THE CREATION OF STANLEY KUBRICK’S
2001: A SPACE
ODYSSEY
• NURI BILGE CEYLAN’S ‘WINTER SLEEP’ • ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV’S ‘LEVIATHAN’
• DAVID THOMSON ON THE WESTERN • ‘STATIONS OF THE CROSS’ • ‘THE HOMESMAN’
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Contents December 2014
Conversation piece
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep is a claustrophobic,
psychologically acute chamber drama with echoes of
Chekhov, Bergman and Shakespeare. By Geoff Andrew
REGULARS
5 Editorial All year red carpet
Rushes
6 David Cairns on Jacques
Tati, urban planner
8 Object Lesson: Hannah
McGill drops a bomb
9 The Five Key...: whistleblower films
10 Interview: Trevor Johnston talks to
Craig Johnson, writer-director of the
dark comedy drama The Skeleton Twins
1 3 Dispatches: Mark Cousins suggests
a typically idiosyncratic new
curriculum for film schools
The Industry
14 Development Tale: Charles Gant
on keeping Paddington on track
1 5 The Numbers: Charles Gant on Ida and
the logic of September releases in the UK
16 Brewster: Ben Roberts meets the
inspirational US director Ira Sachs
Wide Angle
50 Kieron Corless meets artist-director
Omer Fast on the set of his adaptation of
Tom McCarthy’s cult novel Remainder
52 Soundings: Frances Morgan
on the astonishing sounds of
Uzbek film 40 Days of Silence
5 3 Primal Screen: John Oliver on fantastic
invasions before World War I
54 Festival: Jason Anderson at
Toronto International Film
Festival’s Wavelengths strand
111 Letters
Endings
11 2 Charlie Fox on Pierrot lefou
FEATURES
18
COVER FEATURE
Intelligent design -
the creation of 2001: A Space Odyssey
The full story of how Stanley Kubrick
mounted his ‘definitive attempt’ at the
science-fiction film, including previously
unpublished sketches by his production
designer Harry Lange. By Christopher
Frayling. PLUS, from the archives,
David Robinson visits the set of the film
26
Here be monsters
Leviathan, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s tense
drama about a man struggling to save his
home from a corrupt mayor, offers a savage
portrait of modem Russia. By Ian Christie
36
Watching the river flow
It’s impossible to watch an old-fashioned
western with the same eyes as in, say, the
late 40s, but their influence still colours
the way we receive modern counterparts
like TheHomesman By David Thomson
40
Dreams of a life
Steve James’s Life Itself is an infectiously
warm documentary about the career of US
film critic Roger Ebert. By Nick Bradshaw
44
Holy motors
Stations of the Cross, Dietrich Briiggemann’s
exploration of a teenage girl’s growing
religious fanaticism, joins a string of films
looking at the role of Christianity in the
modem world. By Catherine Wheatley
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 1
★★★★★
- EYE FOR FILM
"One of the Best
Films of the Year"
- DEREK MALCOLM
LEA VAN ACKEN FRANZISKA WEISZ
EIFF
WINNER
niM
64'Kr-'
Competition
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
A FILM BY DIETRICH BRUGGEMANN certis
MficfiON dncO SWR»
www.findanyfilm/stationsofthecross
www.facebook.com/StationsoftheCrossU K
IN SELECT CINEMAS & ON DIGITAL/ON DEMAND NOVEMBER 28
Sglit&Somid
(incorporating Monthly Film Bulletin)
Published monthly by the BFI
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Volume 24 Issue 12 (NS)
ISSN 0037-4806 USPS 496-040
CONTRIBUTORS
Jason Anderson is a film
critic based in Toronto
Geoff Andrew is senior film
programmer at BFI Southbank
Michael Brooke is a freelance
writer and film historian
David Cairns writes about film
on his blog Shadowplay
Ian Christie is a professor at
Birkbeck College, London. His last
book, as editor, was Audiences,
and he is now working on a book
of Eisenstein’s drawings
Ashley Clark is a freelance film
critic and film programmer
Jordan Cronk is a freelance film
critic based in Los Angeles
Charlie Fox is a freelance
critic and writer
Christopher Frayling is a cultural
historian and broadcaster. His
book The 2001 File: Harry Lange
and the Design of the Landmark
Science Fiction Film will be
published in March 2015
Simon McCallum is the
Mediatheque curator at the BFI
Frances Morgan is deputy
editor of The Wire
Nathalie Morris is curator of special
collections at the BFI National Archive
Kim Newman s most recent
book is the BFI Film Classic
on Quatermass and the Pit
John Oliver is a curator at
the BFI National Archive
Nick Pinkerton is a freelance writer.
His regular column ‘Bombast’
appears in Film Comment
Tony Rayns's 25 years of involvement
in Korean cinema are celebrated
in Seo Wontae’s documentary
The Not-so Distant Observer
David Thomson’s most recent book
is Moments that Made the Movies
Catherine Wheatley is a lecturer
at King’s College, London, and the
author of Michael Haneke 's Cinema
COVER
Kei r Du I lea i n 2001; A Space
Odyssey. Design by Nick Wrigley.
Retouched by DawkinsColour
NEXT ISSUE
on sale 2 December
Contents Reviews
FILMS OF THE MONTH
58 Concerning Violence
60 The Homesman
62 Sacro GRA
FILMS
64 Alexander and the
Terrible, Horrible, No
Good, Very Bad Dat;
64 Annabelle
65 Bang Bang!
65 Bjork: Biophilia Live
66 BlackButler
66 The Book of Life
67 The Case Against 8
68 Citizenfour
69 Dracula Untold
69 The Drop
70 Fury
71 Giovanni's Island
72 Going Away
73 The Great Museum
73 Haider
74 Hockney
75 Honeymoon
75 lAmAli
76 The Imitation Game
77 Leviathan
78 Life Itself
80 Luna
80 Mary Is Happy,
Mary Is Happy.
81 My Old Lady
82 The Necessary Death of
Charlie Countryman
83 Night Train to Lisbon
83 No Good Deed
84 The November Man
84 The Possibilities Are Endless
86 The Remaining
86 The Rewrite
87 Say When
88 Serena
88 Set Fire to the Stars
89 The Skeleton Twins
90 Stations of the Cross
91 Third Person
91 This Is Where I Leave You
92 What We Do in the Shadows
93 Winter Sleep
HOME CINEMA
96 Films by Frank Borzage,
Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari,
The Clowns, The Death
Kiss, Fedora, Iguana, Le jour
se leve. The Mack Sennett
Collection Volume i. Shivers,
Sofia's Last Ambulance,
Youth of the Beast
DVD features
94 Kim Newman enjoys the
surreal charm of Walerian
Borowczyk’s films
97 Nick Bradshaw on A Jester's
Talehy the Czech master of
fantasy Karel Zeman
102 Lost and Found: Simon
McCallum believes
Elizabeth Taylor gave her
boldest performance in The
Driver's Seat (aka Identikit)
Television
100 Fargo, The History Man
BOOKS
104 Tony Rayns welcomes an
anthology of the great film
critic Raymond Durgnat
105 Nick Pinkerton celebrates
the writings of filmmaker
and teacher George Kuchar
106 Nathalie Morris takes a
visit to Gainsborough
Studio in the silent era
106 Sukhdev Sandhu joins Iain
Sinclair’s 70th birthday
celebrations
And online this month Clio Barnard I Heddy Honigmann I
Gianfranco Rosi I movie musicals and live cinema I black Americans
on screen in r9r 3, and more bfi.org.uk/sightandsound
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 3
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Copyright © BFI, 2014
The views and opinions expressed
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Editorial Nick James
ALL YEAR RED CARPET
By the time you read this, the BFI London Film Festival
will be but a fading memory and my colleagues and
I will be exhorting you to experience the ‘Fear and
Wonder’ of science fiction, as signalled by our 2001
cover. Yet in one way the LFF has achieved a more
lasting effect in the film calendar, in that it’s now seen
as one of the stepping stones for films that have Oscar
potential, such as Foxcatcher, Whiplash, Wild, Fury
and Mr. Turner. A significant number of Academy
members live in the UK, and producers and stars of
award hopefuls find that they can combine a trip to the
LFF with a few Bafta screenings, thereby drumming up
support for a Bafta award, which itself can act as one
of the best kinds of attention-grabber for the Oscars.
The LFF’s new status on the Oscar route was
generally agreed to have been achieved last year, and
it’s been interesting to see that this year’s New York
Film Festival, which talces place at roughly the same
time as the LFF, seems to have gone out of its way to
become part of the same flight path. It’s worth rolling
the carpet back to earlier this year to see how this
has played out. Many of you will know these details
already, but bear with me. Until this year, the NYFF
had a reputation as being above that sort of thing,
its function, from a distance - I’ve never attended -
being solely to show Manhattanites the very best of
world cinema. When summer was at its height, what
commentators like me were looking at was not New
York but how the fight between Toronto, Telluride
and Venice for major American titles would pan out.
This also requires some explaining. By keeping
its programme a secret until the day it began and by
keeping most of the press away from its mountain
location, Telluride had always been able to screen some
of the hottest new films ahead of Toronto. Last year,
however, a kind of unstated protocol was broken when
reviews of 12 Years a S/aue appeared out of Telluride,
thereby infuriating Toronto, which thought it had a
world premiere. The consequence was that Toronto
made a new rule that no film that had appeared at any
other festival could play during its opening weekend,
when the eyes of the world’s press would be upon it.
It was while we were waiting for that particular
bunfight to brealc out that the rather astonishing news
came that David Fincher’s Gone Girl and Paul Thomas
Anderson’s Inherent Vice- arguably the season’s two
most desirable US titles - would be playing first at New
The Oscar cycle now seems to
dominate the way film people think
about the whole year. These days, there
really isn’t much more than a month or
so when it doesn’t come up as a factor
York. In that one moment, the Telluride-Toronto dispute
(of which Venice, which used to be able to negotiate
trade-offs with Toronto, seems to have been the biggest
victim - though it did bag Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu’s
Birdman) looked strangely irrelevant. And one reason
why that was the case is that the Oscar field this year
is so weak. You can tell that because it’s films from
much earlier in the year, such as Boyhood and The Grand
Budapest Hotel, that still seem like the front-runners.
Perhaps it was inevitable that in the year after such a
strong group as 12 Years a Slave, The Wolf of Wall Street,
The Great Beauty, Her and Dallas Buyers Club, the films
would look a little pallid, but what’s more interesting
is the way that the Oscar cycle now seems to dominate
the way film people think about the whole year. These
days, there really isn’t much more than a month or
so when it doesn’t come up as a factor. Last year, films
like The Wolf of Wall Streetignored the festival round
altogether and came in late to the game - which for
publications like this one meant being too late for
201 3’s end-of-year round-ups, and probably too long
ago to have much impact in 2014’s. I don’t know if Wolf
would have done better at the Oscars, or indeed with the
public, had it appeared earlier, but I do know it might
have been featured in more ‘films of the year’ lists.
There may be latecomers this year too that will
feature. Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, Clint
Eastwood’s American Sniper and Angelina Jolie’s
Unbroken may all yet play a part, and maybe play
hell with our own films of the year poll in our next
issue. The preponderance and importance of lists
and awards are surely the clearest sign that the
film business has never been more in thrall to its
own marketing. It’s the only narrative in town. ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 5
Rushes
NEWS AND VIEWS
IN THE FRAME
THE HOUSE THAT JACQUES BUILT
Pipe dreams: for Jacques Tati the space around the gag was a crucial part of the gag itself
ON OUR
RADAR
Sci-Fi Compendium
With a range of lavishly illustrated
essays by experts and novelists
such as Kim Newman, Stephen
Baxter and Alastair Reynolds, the
accompanying book to the BFI’s
nationwide season, ‘Sci-Fi: Days of
Fear and Wonder’, charts a course
through the history of science-
fiction film and television, taking in
space operas, dystopias and special
effects, as well as silent, budget and
avant-garde sci-fi, Afrofuturism,
costume design and much more.
Jacques Lagrange’s set designs
were more than mere adornment
for Jacques Tati - they were central
to how he constructed his gags
By David Cairns
Jacques Tati’s Playtime (igSj) continues its
ascent up the ladder of critical appreciation.
Atrociously undervalued on release, it is
increasingly seen as the climax of his life’s work.
The film’s use of architecture is central to that.
For Tati, as a visual comedian, the space
around the gag was a crucial and inseparable
part of the gag itself. The position and
design of a chair, the height of a wall or the
angle of a corner could not only frame, but
make possible a bit of comic business.
Ever since his second film as director, the smash
hit Mr. Hulofs Holiday Tati had worked
with Jacques Lagrange as his production designer.
More than just a designer of sets, Lagrange was
a designer of gags, since often in Tati’s films the
two are one and the same. It is not enough to
say that Tati’s films create comedy from their
environments. His increasing ambitions as a
satirist meant that he was creating comic worlds
on screen. Contrasting the old Paris with the
new in Mon Oncle (1958), Tati constructed both
from scratch. Hulot’s preposterous tenement,
an accretion of renovations and extensions,
is so entertaining in itself that the camera can
simply sit back in the street, as if at a roadside
cafe, and watch Hulot make his winding
way up various mismatched stairs and along
obscure passages until he reaches the top fiat.
For the home of Hulot’s sister, Lagrange
created a Le Corbusier pastiche by collaging
together images from architectural magazines,
which perhaps accounts for the subtlety of
his parody: all the elements are authentic, but
the proportions are ever so slightly absurd.
Lagrange was a painter and tapestry designer
whose film career consisted solely of his work
with Tati, for which he is credited as ‘artistic
collaborator’ and sometimes co-writer: he
was Tati’s most long-term artistic partner.
Since the visual comedian often had trouble
explaining what he wanted, part of Lagrange’s
role was to sketch ideas, producing hundreds
Into Film Festival
Children and young adults are
normally targeted by the odd
screening or sidebar at most
festivals: here they get their own
event with more than 150 films
showing at 520 venues across
the UK from 4-21 November.
Highlights include a programme
of films about childhood, a
survey of animation studio
LAIKA, including its latest
‘The Boxtrolls’ (right), as well as
masterclasses and workshops.
6 I Sight&Sound December 2014
LISTOMANIA
DANGEROUS GAMES
^ -
f I
An office and a gentleman: Tati in Playtime (1967), increasingly seen as the high point of his life’s work
of drawings until he succeeded in illustrating
what was on Tati’s mind. In the process,
he contributed many ideas of his own.
As Tati’s films became more concerned with
encroaching modernity, Lagrange was called
upon to create more and more. For Hulot, he drew
beach cabins for changing in, a false entrance to a
real hotel, and the defective kayak which causes
Mr. Hulot so much trouble. By the time of Mon
Onc/e Lagrange and Tati had to fully create two
homes and a factory. For Playtime they built a city.
Tativille was a stupendous undertaking,
and the corners cut only make it sound more
ingenious and incredible. The skyscrapers
raised outside Paris were two-dimensional flats,
built on rails so they could be slid around and
recombined to suggest a sprawling metropolis.
When Tati wanted shiny metallic surfaces
without the problem of reflections showing
the camera crew, he had photographs taken
of shiny metal surfaces and printed them up
on vast sheets of matte paper: an image of
shininess is just as good as actual shininess.
After the vast scale of Playtime, TrafLc(ig-ji)
was bound to seem a let-down, but it saw Tati and
Lagrange working just as inventively on a tiny
scale: all the film’s modem gadgets are packed
into a single ‘camper car’, folding up, doubling
up and miniaturising themselves ingeniously.
Tati, despite appearances, was not against
modernity: he seems delighted by it. He just
wanted it to exist side by side with the old world.
Parade (1974) saw Lagrange as co-writer (he
also designed the poster). Made for television
and shot partly on tape, set entirely in a theatre,
it was again viewed as a sad aftermath; but
setting aside unrealistic expectations, it can be
seen as a true development of Tati’s life work.
Where in P/apftme cardboard cut-outs had been
used as a cost-effective way to replace extras,
here they are brought into the foreground as
Tati and some fellow clowns stage a variety
act for a live audience who are slowly replaced
by 2D facsimiles. Tati recreates his act from
his earliest music-hall days, and the world
has become authentically a stage: exteriors
are eliminated, as is the boundary between
performers and audience. Each becomes
as stylised - or as real - as the other. ©
O Playtime is rereleased in UK cinemas on
7 November. A Tati season runs at BFI
Southbank, London, until November 20
As Katniss Everdeen returns to the arena in
The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part i, we look
back on other films about treacherous games.
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
The Most Dangerous Game (1932)
Irving Pichel & Ernest B. Schoedsack
The 10th Victim (1965)
Elio Petri
Punishment Park (1971)
Peter Watkins
Death Race 2000 (1975)
Paul Bartel
Rollerball (1975)
Norman Jewison
The Running Man (1987)
Paul Michael Glaser
Surviving the Game (1994)
Ernest R. Dickerson
The Game (1997)
David Eincher
The Cube (1997)
Vincenzo Natali
Battle Royale (2000)
EukasakuKinji
QUOTE OF THE MONTH
FREDERICK WISEMAN
‘I never start of&with a thesis.
I keep my eyes and my big
ears open and I respond to
the experience of the place’
From a masterclass at the London Film Festival
Vlado Kristi
The pioneering shorts
and radical anarchist
features of this little-
known German auteur
receive their due
from 7-16 November
at London’s Tate
Modern, among them
his early avant-garde
animations such
as ‘Don Quixote’
(1961, right) and
‘Prometheus’ (1966).
Leeds International Film Festival
Beyond the UK premieres, including
Alejandro Gonzalez lharritu’s ‘Birdman
or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)’
(right) and Pascale Ferran’s‘Bird People’,
this year’s edition (5-20 November) boasts
some fascinating historical programmes,
from Konstantin Lopushansky’s
apocalyptic visions to Alex de la Iglesia’s
overlooked black comedies and horrors, as
well as Ingmar Bergman’s films set on his
adopted island of Faro and a retrospective
dedicated to Spanish directors Luis Garcia
Berlanga and Juan Antonio Bardem.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 7
RUSHES
OBJECT LESSON
TOO CLEVER BY HALF
A disarming manner: Lieutenant Doolittle (Brian Nareile) ventures outside the ship to reason with Bomb 20 in John Carpenter’s goofy, glamourless Dark Star
As the ‘smart bomb’ in
John Carpenter’s Dark Star
demonstrates, nothing is more
explosive than the ability to think
By Hannah McGill
“Don’t give me any of
that intelligent life stuff.
Just find me something
I can blow up,” comes
the instruction from
Lieutenant Doolittle
(Brian Nareile) as tempers fray and fatigue
deepens in John Carpenter’s goofy, glamourless
space meander. Dark Star (igy 4). As it transpires,
the intelligent life that’s going to get in his way
isn’t on the planets he’s out to destroy; it’s housed
in the bomb itself, a ‘smart’ weapon with which
the crew can communicate. Upon getting stuck
in the bay on its way out. Bomb 20 can see no
option but to explode anyway, destroying the
ship and the crew. It’s a bomb. That’s what it’s
meant to do. The conferral of intelligence upon
a piece of machinery has not made it safer for its
human handlers, but more dangerous, because it
is using its limited reasoning to opt for maximum
destructiveness. “You taught me language, and
my profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse,” says
Caliban to Prospero in The Tempest, Bomb 20’s take
is, “You taught me what I am, so I’m going to see
that through, even if I take you all out with me.”
A philosophical chat with a desperate Doolittle
while the clock ticks almost turns the bomb’s
intentions around - since it can’t be sure of the
existence of the universe beyond itself, how can
it rely on the data that it thinks has instructed it
to explode? -but finally has the opposite effect,
causing the bomb to have a sort of existential
breakdown. If external input is all false data,
Doolittle is false data too; the bomb can only be
certain of itself; its purpose can only be to create
light in the empty darkness around it; BANG.
Like its clear precursor, 2001: A Space Odyssey’s
self-aware ship’s computer HAL 9000, DarkStafs
bomb presents a nihilistic spin on Isaac Asimov’s
1942 Laws of Robotics, which suggest that a
robot’s self-preservation is not to be prioritised
over the safety of a human or the execution of
a human order; and on the frequent fictional
challenge they face, whereby the development
of consciousness in robots poses a moral
challenge to this inferior status. Robots possessed
of burgeoning intelligence might gratify the
audience by evolving human-style emotions, as
in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (iggi) (“I know now
why you cry”), or even ethics, as in The Iron Giant
(1999) (“I am not a gun”); frequently, as in both of
those movies, they solve the narrative problem
of their own conscious existence by making an
informed choice for self-sacrifice. Consciousness,
in these examples, is represented by the capacity
to identify and differentiate ‘right’ and ‘wrong’,
allied to which is a capacity to care about other
individuals. But if endowed with human-style
consciousness and emotions, why wouldn’t
Inside HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey
8 I Sight&Sound December 2014
THF PIVF KFY
WHICTLEBLOWER FILMS
feeling machines, like humans, sometimes
become confused, or go mad? Or just get bored]
The subversiveness of Dark Star lies in
its rejection of certain dominant tenets of
space travel and science-fiction narratives.
The notion that interstellar adventure has an
inherent grandeur and importance is exploded,
as is any assumption that it will forever be
undertaken-as in The Right Stuff {igSs)-hY
the best and the brightest These astronauts
are dull, frustrated individuals carrying out
menial work; “truck drivers in space”, as director
John Carpenter famously put it. And any
consciousness-expanding, life-enhancing effect
of the experience, of the sort lovingly shared
by real ex-astronauts in the documentary likes
of In the Shadow of the Moon (2007), is countered
by the dull thud of existential restlessness: the
gnawing desire, even when at the frontier of
human knowledge, to be somewhere else, doing
something else. (Surfing, in Lt Doolittle’s case.)
The term ‘smart bomb’ was only just coming
into use when Dark Star was made, and would
become most prominent as a replacement for
‘guided missile’ during the 1991 Gulf War. A
1979 article by Jonathan V. Post for the science
magazine Omni, titled ‘Cybernetic war’, explained
to its readers that “a ‘smart’ bomb is one that
uses sensors (such as television cameras) and
a compact computer to mimic the human
process of perception and decision-making,
thus finding its target by planning, instead of
blind luck”. Such devices had, however, been
in use since World War II, when the Germans
If endowed with human-style
consciousness and emotions, why
wouldn’t machines sometimes
become confused, or go mad?
successfully deployed one of their ‘Fritz X’
guided missiles to sink the Italian battleship
Roma. Pathe news footage from 1952 excitedly
introduces the ‘Tarzon’, an American “bomb
with a brain” that it credits with “an eerie,
almost human understanding”, and suggests
“could be the world’s most terrifying weapon”.
It’s curious that the imitation of human
understanding is presented as a prospect more
“terrifying” than random destructiveness. Perhaps
the fear stems from an underlying awareness that
human traits, however much we might strain to
develop them in gadgets and encourage them in
other animals, don’t form part of predictable or
reliable packages of behaviour. Said Asimov of
his robot laws, “The Three Laws are the only way
in which rational human beings can deal with
robots - or with anything else. But when I say that,
I always remember (sadly) that human beings
are not always rational.” Which surely damns
their most sophisticated robots to irrationality,
too. The effort to construct more effective
machines by instilling them with human-like
I behaviours therefore presents an intriguingly
I contradictory picture, in which the certainty
g initially displayed by Dark Stafs bomb - “What is
I your one purpose in life?” “To explode, of course!”
s - might even be regarded as a little enviable. ©
As Laura Poitras’s Citizenfourhits
UK screens, we honour cinema’s
finest bean spillers for refusing to
bow to corruption and cover-ups
By Michael Brooke
Whistleblowing - the noble act undertaken by
individuals who, as Hitchcock might have put it,
“know too much” - is an intrinsically dramatic
subject, as the newly released Citizenfour, Laura
Poitras’s portrait of surveillance whistleblower
Edward Snowden, amply demonstrates.
Indeed, although marketed as entertainment,
most of the films cited here were inspired
by actual events, and all tackled distinctly
hot-potato material, even if looking back
almost half a century (The Nasty Girt). But that
only accentuates their potency: in watching
them, one becomes a fellow-conspirator,
sharing the thrill of discovery while avoiding
the possible consequences of exposure.
2 The China Syndrome (1979)
Although fictional, this thriller about a
nuclear-industry cover-up exposed by a TV
news crew (Jane Fonda, Michael Douglas)
and a whistleblowing plant supervisor (Jack
Lemmon) raised so many uncomfortable
issues that the industry launched a PR counter-
attack - only to be humbled by the Three
Mile Island accident occurring less than a
fortnight into the film’s initial release.
4 The Insider (1999)
Michael Mann has made bigger, flashier
films, but few that are as concentratedly
riveting as this portrait of real-life tobacco-
industry whistleblower Jeffrey Wigand
(a barely recognisable Russell Crowe) and
the lengths that he had to go to expose
corporate perjury on behalf of companies
with a vested interest in maintaining the
official lie that nicotine is not addictive.
I On the Waterfront (1954)
Based partly on the true story of Hoboken
longshoreman Anthony DiVincenzo (who
sued for acknowledgement), Elia Kazan’s
masterly dissection of mob-ruled dock unions
and the drawbacks of standing up to them is
elevated to a masterpiece by the tormented
performance of Marlon Brando as a man whose
ambition to become a (boxing) contender
was thwarted by fight-rigging skulduggery.
3 The Nasty Girl (1990)
When asked to write about life in her
home town during the Third Reich for a school
essay contest, Sonja (Lena Stolze, channelling
real-life Anna Rosmus) uncovers so much
embarrassing information about her elders’
complicity in events that concerted efforts are
made to suppress her research by authorities and
vigilantes alike - the film’s title being one of the
more printable epithets aimed in her direction.
5 Erin Brockovich (2000)
Arguably the biggest whistleblowing
household name (at least in part due to Julia
Roberts’s Oscar-winning, cleavage-toting
performance), Erin Brockovich was a legal
clerk who inadvertently uncovered corporate
malfeasance to do with groundwater pollution
and tenaciously forced the guilty firm into a
courtroom showdown with the help of her boss,
a small-town lawyer (played by Albert Finney).
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 9
RUSHES
INTERVIEW
THE GREAT DEPRESSION
Craig Johnson, the director of the
award-winning black comedy
The Skeleton Twins, talks siblings,
suicide and cinematic heroes
By Trevor Johnston
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. The indie
movie that no one wanted to finance ends up
winning the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award
at Sundance, gamering rave reviews and selling
all over the globe. The casting evidently wasn’t
the stumbling block with The Skeleton Twins, a
serio-comic tale of sibling solidarity graced by
the presence of Kristen Wiig from sleeper smash
Bridesmaids; Saturday Night Live mamstdiY Bill
Hader; and Ty Burrell, twice an Emmy winner
as America’s nicest dad in Modem Family. The
original screenplay by Black Swan scribe Mark
Heyman and second-time director Craig Johnson
does, however, follow a decidedly unconventional
trajectory that is anything but feelgood.
The film opens with an attempted suicide,
the aftermath of which sends depressive failed
actor Milo (Hader) back from Los Angeles to
stay with his sister Maggie (Wiig), who lives a
seemingly idyllic married life in upstate New
York. Subsequent events take in self-deception,
infidelity, the spectre of failure and a relatively
non-judgemental overview, told in flashback,
of an illicit relationship between high-school
teacher Rich (Burrell) and Milo when he was
a 15-year-old student. That’s strong dramatic
material for a story looking to heal its characters’
wounds with abundant laughter, and finding
a tonal balance between dark and light proved
key for Johnson, as his film intriguingly
makes a space for itself midway between
indie endeavour and mainstream appeal.
Trevor Johnston: Did you have quite a task
to convince potential producers that this
Bergmanesque subject matter could actually
be funny, touching and enjoyable?
Craig Johnson: There was a period of, like, forever
when nobody wanted to do it. They would say,
“Boy, this is a great script. It’s dark, it’s complex,
it’s funny - but it’s way too dark and weird for us.
Laughter in the dark: Craig Johnson
so we’re not gonna make it.” But, like anything
else, somehow you find a way. And we did.
TJ: Was casting performers known for comedy
a way of making it easier for the viewer to come
to terms with suicide, depression and so forth?
CJ: I’d say the whole process was more intuitive
and natural than that. My personality has always
gravitated towards the humorous side of things,
but it’s definitely a gallows sense of humour. To
me what I find funniest in life is coping with the
dark shit, the Bergmanesque stuff. As we all know,
life can sometimes go from tragedy to farce inside
a matter of minutes, but these days the genre
delineation in moviemaking is so strong - like,
Thei; would say ‘Boy this is
a great script. It’s dark, it’s
complex, it’sjiinny - but it’s
way too dark and weird for us’
this is a drama, and that’s a comedy - you tend not
to see stories which represent those sort of truths.
TJ: Those swift transitions from dark to
light are a risky business though and when
they don’t work it’s painfully obvious.
CJ: Sure. You go too much into comedic territory
and you take the audience out of the realness
of the story, but if you push the drama too hard
you can end up with eye-rolling melodrama. We
really only found the balance in the edit. Take
the scene where Kristen and Bill are high on
nitrous oxide in the dentist’s surgery. Those two
improv’d the shit out of that scene and we had
all this hilarious stuff. First rule of comedy is that
you don’t cut anything that gets a laugh, yet we
had to prune a lot of it because all of a sudden
it felt like you were watching two professional
comedians bouncing off each other rather than
a real brother and sister. And a lot of what you
see is infused with my own relationship with
my sister, and the shared sense of humour that’s
helped the two of us through some tough times.
TJ: In this instance, Maggie’s living a marital lie
and Milo is seemingly unable to move on from
his turbulent adolescence, yet they’re united by
a sense that their lives haven’t really measured
up to their expectations. That’s not regular
subject matter on American screens, is it?
CJ: No, it isn’t. I do feel that it’s a hallmark of
my generation though, as a child of the 80s.
It was the time of, “You can be anything”. We
were very encouraged, and perhaps felt almost
entitled, like we were all going to be rock stars or
play pro basketball. Some of us didn’t question
that maybe we would have to work for it, or we
were just blind to the fact that we weren’t that
talented. I know I’m really fortunate to be doing
what I love, but if it hadn’t worked out for me
I’d be suicidal. I’d be teetering off the edge of a
building. Yet for most people life is a compromise.
Actually, Greenberg is very good about that.
TJ: So is Noah Baumbach a celluloid
touchstone for you?
CJ: Certainly. The Squid and the Whale wdiS a
movie which inspired my co-writer Mark to sit
down and suggest we write something which
was so human and bittersweet. But I look back
on Hal Ashby and Milos Forman’s early films
too, as well as being a massive John Hughes fan.
TJ: For all Hughes’s groundbreaking exploration
of the emotional intensity of high-school life,
he certainly never tackled this kind of seriously
inappropriate teacher-student relationship
- why take on such high-risk material?
CJ: It’s not just inappropriate, it’s illegal. That’s
the black and white of it, but, of course, real life
is never quite like that. At 1 5 Milo experiences
the love of his life, he’s a sexual creature and
carries a torch for years afterwards, even
though the teacher’s actions are so obviously
wrong. It was important to me that we never
judge any of these characters, and the Milo
we see later, who’s an outsider, a bit of a truth-
teller, and way too snarky for his own good,
is also so damaged that your heart goes out to
him. It’s like Roger Ebert said, movies really
are empathy-generating machines. ©
O The Skeleton Twins is released in UK
cinemas on 7 November and is reviewed
on page 89
Damage control: Bill Hader as Milo and Kristen Wiig as Maggie in The Skeleton Twins
10 I Sight&Sound December 2014
PHOTOGRAPHY BY JOHANNES SIMON/GETTY IMAGES
12a suicide scene
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★ ★★★★
A thing of
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Pure cinemdtic
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A film by Goran Hugo Olsson ^ f ss
Based on Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth
Narrated by Ms. Lauryn Hill
In Cinemas from
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RUSHES
50 WEEKS TO LEARN FILM, PT 1
Not ever3^hing they teach at film
school should be practical. How
about a little Edmund Burke or
nude figure drawing instead?
By Mark Cousins
Should we plant a
bomb under film school
courses and see where
the pieces fall? Might
we fire university
film studies courses
into the sky, on a magnesium rocket, and see
the smithereens fall to earth, like the man who
fell to earth, like the climax of Nicolas Roeg’s
Eureka, when Jack McCann finds his gold?
Lots of good things happen in film schools
and on film courses, which are often taught by
great people, but they have often, too, lost their
senses. Literally They teach about equipment and
production, when their job is really to awaken
in students a sensory response to the world. This
matters now more than ever because there are
hundreds of film courses in the UK alone, and
if you count the number of them around the
world, you’ll probably get into five figures. Add
to this the little fact that there are now four-and-
a-half billion mobile phone users, of which at
least one billion have phones that can shoot
moving imagery (a virus let loose by the Lumiere
brothers and Edison?) and you have strong
reasons for asking how filming should be taught.
Below are my answers. As I’ve just read
Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, and
been to the Bauhaus museum in Weimar in
Germany, where radical ideas about teaching
creativity and craft were developed, and
since I’m lucky enough to have talked to
Samira Makhmalbaf about the methods her
father, Mohsen, used in Iran to teach his kids
filmmaking, my suggestions are irregular.
My course would be called ‘50 weeks to learn
film’. Like the great American theatre director
and educator, Peter Sellars, on day one, when the
students arrive. I’d tell them that they’d all passed,
but that now comes the hard part. Then, together,
we’d pick up a pack of 50 cards, each of which
has a week-long theme or project written on it.
We’d shuffle the deck, and then lay them out in
a row. That row of themes would be the course.
And what would the themes be? Deep breath:
1 A week on colour: Goethe’s ideas about
contrasting hues, and the colours in
shadows; colour in nature, in the beaches of
Harris and Lewis in Scotland; costume and
design in the movies of Jacques Demy.
2 Eyeline: Oliver Hardy looking at the
camera, the eyelines of the Madonna in
Russian icon painting (they look almost at
the viewer but not quite), eyelines in the
films of George Cukor and Ozu Yasujiro.
3 Wedding films: many of the most profitable
films ever made (judged by percentage return
on investment) are about weddings - The
Wedding Banquet, My Big Fat Greek Wedding,
Monsoon Wedding, Four Weddings and a Funeral,
Muriel’s Wedding, Bridesmaids, Mamma MiaL
What can we learn from why they work?
4 Nude figure drawing.
5 Focus: in Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Hitchcock, Kira
Muratova, Leonardo da Vinci and Mantegna.
6 Obsessive motifs: Scorsese on Lower
Manhattan, Picasso on the face of Dora
Maar, Lyonel Feininger on the church at
Gelmeroda. The students choose a motif and
make a different film about it every day.
7 Nature studies: Scandinavian films
of the 1 9 1 os, the work of Albrecht
Diirer, the writing of Rousseau.
8 Thought: in Virginia Woolf, James Joyce,
Federico Fellini, Scorsese and Forough Farrokhzad.
9 Storytelling, blocking and emotion in 13th- and
14th-century Italian painting: Duccio, Cimabue,
Film schools teach about
equipment and production, when
their job is to awaken in students
a sensory response to the world
Giotto (including a trip to the Scrovegni chapel).
10 Walkabout: each student disappears,
goes off grid, for a week, with no
means of communication.
11 Other: each student lives a life or has an
experience that is totally foreign to them.
12 Kick the truth out: The Emperor’s Naked
Army Marches On, and how to show
what you aren’t allowed to show.
13 The sublime: in Werner Herzog,
Caspar David Friedrich and Burke.
14 Storytelling in three-minute pop
songs: The Kinks, Squeeze, PJ Harvey.
15 The art of persuasion: how to charm
officials to let you in to places (includes
Herzog’s advice that you should always
“carry bolt cutters everywhere”).
16 Tension in stoiyteliing: Hitchcock, Stephen
King, Patricia Highsmith, Mohammad-Ali Talebi.
17 Poetics: in Aristotle, David Lynch, Le
Corbusier and Pier Paolo Pasolini.
18 The mirth of nations: comedy
cinema around the world.
19 Vengeance and violence: in Djibril Diop
Mambety, Quentin Tarantino and John Woo.
20 Movement and blocking: in the films
of Tsui Hark, King Hu and Orson Welles,
and the paintings of Tintoretto.
21 Sound poetics: in the movies of Kira
Muratova, Paul Thomas Anderson and
Hitchcock, and the work of Walter Murch.
22 Music week: taught entirely in the dark.
23 “What might never have been seen”: Films
that showed lives that had never before been
on screen - the work of Kim Longinotto, John
Sayles, Anand Patwardhan and Kenneth Anger.
24 Voice, and how to find it: the distinctive
look and feel of the movies of John Ford,
Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Michael
Mann, and the paintings of Francis Bacon.
25 Performance: A whole week on the film by
Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell, which will
include the students undergoing changes.
That’s the first 25 weeks. Sounds exhausting,
I know, but I think it could be inspiring.
I’ll describe part two next month... ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound 1 13
The Industry
BUSINESS NEWS & OPINION
DEVELOPMENT TALE
PADDINGTON
iAy chihuahua!: Paddington channels Paris Hilton on the London Underground
How the man behind the
Harry Potter films gave
another beloved children’s
character a screen makeover
By Charles Gant
Michael Bond’s Paddington Bear stories,
first published in 1958, have been adapted
for television multiple times, and the iconic
marmalade-scoffing character has at various
stages found himself incorporated into Royal
Mail stamps, Marmite TV advertising and the
Google logo. But in 50 years, there has never
been a film version. Perhaps the episodic
nature of the source material - Paddington
gets into a series of scrapes, involving such
obstacles as a hot bath, lawn mower and tube
station escalator - didn’t suggest it as a feature
film. And as a lone animal in a human world,
his universe could be seen as less rich than
the animation-friendly tales of A.A. Milne.
But UK producer David Heyman came to
believe otherwise. At the suggestion of his
Heyday Films colleague Rosie Alison he reread
the books, and felt a strong connection. “The
story of an outsider, this bear from Peru, coming
to London in search of a place to belong. It’s
the story of an immigrant. This idea that home
is not just where you’re from, it’s where you
make it, rang true for me, and feels like a story
in these times where people are so fluid.”
Having secured rights from Bond’s agent, and
having met the author and his daughter Karen
Jankel, Heyman was ready to pitch it to his
paymasters Warner Bros, where he has a first-look
deal. “I’d been making films for them for a little
while, family films, that had done well,” Heyman
says, with not a little understatement: he was the
producer of the $ 7.7 billion-grossing Harry Potter
series. “With some gentle persuasion, they were
prepared to take a punt.” In 2007, the film was
announced, with Hamish McColl writing the
screenplay. At the time, McColl’s sole screenplay
credit was Mr. Bean’s Holiday, though he is known
for his groundbreaking surreal comedy work
as half of the duo The Right Size, creators of the
West End hit The Play What I Wrote. (He has since
co-written Johnny English Reborn, and is currently
working on the upcoming Dad’s Army film.)
To develop the world of the film, Heyman
brought on Paul King as director - perhaps a
surprising choice, given that King’s previous film
was the low-budget Bunny and the Bull, which had
mixed creative and commercial success. Heyday
comments, “I like working with directors, not
necessarily [for] their first film, but taking them
from a slightly smaller film to a big film. Alfonso
[Cuardn] had made big films, but not quite on the
scale of Potter when he did [Harry Potter and the
Prisoner of] Azkaban I love that dialogue between
those two spirits.” King, a fan of the original
Paddington TV show, worked on further drafts
with McColl, and then alone. McColl receives a
joint ‘story by’ credit on the film with King, who
is the director and sole credited screenwriter.
As the years ticked by and no film was
announced, speculation began to mount that
Warners was losing interest, which turned
out to be the case. “They have a set formula,”
Heyman explains. “When we were making the
film with Warner Bros, by the very nature of it
being at Warner Bros, it was going to be a more
expensive film. And then they run numbers
against those numbers. We ended up making
the film for considerably less than it would have
been.” French-owned StudioCanal stepped in,
and the film was announced again in May 2012.
By this stage, the team had created a filmic
storyline. “We needed to create some opposition
for Paddington,” says Heyman. “In the books,
he’s immediately welcomed into the home
by all. We’ve made Mr Brown slightly more
nervous about bringing a bear from Peru, or from
anywhere, into their home.” The more perilous
challenge to the bear seems a playful choice
for anyone who remembers the popularity of
duffel-coated Paddington teddy bears in the 1970s:
King has introduced a taxidermist, Millicent,
played by Nicole Kidman. “For a multitude of
reasons, she wants to complete her collection
by stuffing Paddington,” Heyman says.
14 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
In the books, Paddington inhabits a notably
privileged milieu: Mr and Mrs Brown first
meet him when collecting their daughter Judy
from boarding school, and their home near
Maida Vale has a housekeeper, Mrs Bird The
film avoids the boarding-school angle, having
the whole family meet Paddington together
after a family outing. As for Mrs Bird, played by
Julie Walters, “We’ve made her a bit more of a
family relative who’s living with them. We don’t
highlight the fact that she’s a housekeeper.”
The transition from the book illustrations
and TV animations to a three-dimensional
character interacting with real human actors
required a change in the look of Paddington.
“We’ve had to adapt him to be less of a teddy
bear and more of a living, breathing bear,” says
Heyman. “And we also had to bring the idea of
this bear existing in our world, and so we had to
shift the design to make him, yes, more bearish,
but less bearish than a real bear, so that he could
blend more easily with the Brown family.”
Having already announced Colin Firth as
the voice of Paddington, the production made
headlines in June this year when he “consciously
uncoupled” from the film, and again in July
when Ben Whishaw was cast as his replacement.
Heyman says they offered Firth the role without
testing him: “We worked with him for a while,
and he [was] wonderful. But what we came to
Colin Firth’s voice is that of
a ^o-year-old man. We needed
a more youthful, higher-
pitched, less silky timbre
realise, the character coming alive in front of our
eyes, Colin’s voice is that of a 50-year-old man. It’s
deeper, it’s got a different feel. We needed a more
youthful, higher-pitched, less silky timbre.”
The casting change has been stressful, and
also costly. Says Heyman, “We made the decision
quite late in the day, and it was a bit daunting, as
you animate to the voice. We had to change all
the animation - you don’t just stick a voice on the
existing animation. So that was a big, big thing.”
Combining live actors with a full CGI
character, Paddington cannot be a low-budget film,
which means it would be a stretch to recoup the
investment from the UK market alone. Heyman
and StudioCanal - which distributes in France,
Germany, UK and Australia - had to believe
that the film could remain resolutely British,
yet still have global appeal, as Harry Potter did.
Heyman remarks: “To give too much credit
or put too much weight on Potter alone... Potter
in some ways is part of a long tradition and in
some ways is an outlier. Part of a long tradition,
as we have been a home of Lewis Carroll, and
J.M. Barrie and Roald Dahl. And an outlier, the
level of success of the book, which fed into the
success of the films, is exceptional. But I have to
believe that good films, well told, will connect.
If there is universal humanity within a story, it
will travel. There are many, many British [family]
novels and films that have done rather well.” ©
O Paddington is released on November 28
and will be reviewed in a future issue
THE NUMBERS
IDA
By Charles Gant
Last October, Pawel Pawlikowski scooped
Best Film at the 2013 London Film Festival
for /da, beating competition from titles
including Starred Up and Under the Skin.
The win provided a great platform for its UK
release, you’d imagine, but in the event local
distributor Curzon Artificial Eye opted to wait
11 months before bringing Ida to cinemas.
Few would take issue with the commercial
outcome - £318,000 at press time, the highest
ever UK gross for a Polish-language film.
Released on September 26, just 12 days
before the 2014 edition of the festival,
Ida landed on what is increasingly being
recognised as the pre-LFF ‘sweet spot’: a
relatively non-competitive window created
by the need or desire for many films to be
included in the festival and released thereafter,
including ones initially launched in Berlin
{DIfret 71), Sundance (Whiplash), Cannes
(Mr. Turner, Foxcatcher, Winter Sleep),\/en\ce
(The Cut) or Toronto (The Imitation Game). If
you opt not to play the festival - or, as in /da’s
case, play the LFF but then wait almost a whole
calendar year to release - you might well
grab the chance of a clear run at audiences.
When Curzon acquired Ida, it was already
booked to play London, but the distributor
couldn’t see a way to date it by year’s end. As
Jon Rushton of Curzon explains, “We already
had Le Week-End, The Selfish Giant and Blue
Is the Warmest Colour. We just felt we had got
as many good release dates as we were going
to get from exhibition in this period. It was
always going to be 2014 for Ida, but the awards
corridor of Januaiy-February was a big no-no.
There were big films coming out: the Amer/can
Hustles of this world and The Wolf of Wall
Street. The festival win was lovely, but wherever
we put it, the win was to an extent going to be
oldish news. In the end, we decided we could
afford to put distance between Ida and the
festival, and put it on a date before the 2014
LFF. Our challenge would be PR and whatever
marketing money we had to bring it back to
The September issue: Ida
life, and actually it was fine. We were lucky that
we had genuine critical acclaim, and you could
position the film as a return to form for Pawel.”
The September strategy has worked for
countless films (see chart, below), including
Artificial Eye’s own Fish Tank, Winter’s Bone,
Melancholia and The Great Beauty, all of which
forfeited the chance to play in the London
festival in favour of a release at this time.
Cannes competitor Fish Tank and Winter’s
Bone, a Sundance premiere, instead had a UK
showcase at Edinburgh: distributors would
benefit from that festival once again becoming
a strong platform for UK release. Rushton
says, “The disadvantage of the LFF being so
powerful - and the advantages far outweigh the
disadvantages - is it’s one festival in October,
and then you’re waiting for the next October.
So Sundance London [in April], we did Frank,
and Somerset House [where Film4 sponsor
open-air screenings in August] we did the
Dardennes’ Two Days, One Night. It’s obviously
useful for a distributor if you have more than one
festival you can genuinely launch a film at.”©
SELECTED SEPTEMBER RELEASES, UK BOX OFFICE
Film
Year
Gross
Blue Jasmine
2013
£5,273,695
Jane Eyre
2011
£5,076,087
Drive
2011
£3,041,525
I've Loved You So Long
2008
£1,223,827
The Great Beauty
2013
£1,000,997
Winter’s Bone
2010
£749,725
Fish Tank
2009
£599,282
Melancholia
2011
£583,366
Ida
2014
£318,271*
Holy Motors
2012
£243,320
^gross after 24 days
December 2014 | Sight&Sound 1 15
THE INDUSTRY
BREWSTER
CONTROLLING INTEREST
BFI FILM FUND INSIGHTS
Ira Sachs’s inspiring career
shows how cost control
and smart fundraising can
enable art to flourish
By Ben Roberts
As part of this year’s
^ ' London Film Festival,
we decided to indulge
ourselves. What were
misleadingly described
in the Industry
Programme as ‘Meet the Commissioner’ talks,
were actually an opportunity for my Film Fund
colleague Lizzie Francke and me, along with our
opposite numbers at Film4 and BBC Films, to
play the fan for an hour or so, talking to a visiting
filmmaker we admired about their latest work.
The only rules were that we couldn’t choose
a film we had worked on, and it shouldn’t
be from the UK. The benefit to us and the
audience - mostly aspiring British writers,
directors and producers - would be a different
take on international filmmaking from
someone making a pretty good fist of it.
Lizzie spoke to Cdine Sciamma about
Girlhood, Film4’s Anna Higgs spoke to David
Robert Mitchell about It Follows, BBC Films’ Joe
Oppenheimer talked to casting director Jeanne
McCarthy about Foxcatcher, and I got to sit down
with American filmmaker Ira Sachs, whose Love
Is premiered in Sundance in January and
received glowing reviews on its US release.
Love Is Strange, due in the UK in February,
is a New York story about two older men,
longtime partners and recently married, who
find themselves temporarily separated when
one loses his job and they lose their apartment.
One reason I wanted to talk to Ira about the
film is that it’s progressive in a number of ways:
sexuality still presents practical and emotional
hurdles, but is not itself the source of personal
anxieties. Ben (John Lithgow) and George (Alfred
Molina) are happy and settled, the centre of
a supportive circle of family and friends. The
film clearly reflects Ira’s own circumstances,
recently married and father of twins. He struck
me as someone equally comfortable and
purposeful in his personal and professional life.
Few in the audience had seen the film, so our
conversation focused less on creative detail than
on the business. In this respect Ira is remarkable.
As an accessible but ‘queer’ filmmaker (he also
curates the monthly Queer/Art/Film series at the
IFC Centre in New York), his work has existed
on the fringes, making financing a challenge.
His most expensive film has been Married Life,
which cost around $12 million and grossed a little
over $ 1.5 million. He said that was an eye-opener:
he realised that to keep complete control of his
Ira Sachs describes himself as
‘a good salesman’ but he never
promises an investor that they
will make their money back
Love Is Strange: John Lithgow and Alfred Molina
work he had to accept that the financial value
of his films was relatively modest - around $ 1.5
million, in fact - and cut his coat accordingly.
After he made a $2,000 short.
Last Address- his “most watched” film, which
brought him to the attention of many culturally
engaged financiers. He raised the money for
Keep the Lights On (around $600,000) through
a combination of Kickstarter and some 400
private angels, who were given a producer
credit (associate, executive or producer)
according to the level of their investment.
That’s an impressive bit of fundraising. Ira
describes himself as “a good salesman”, but
he never promises an investor that they will
make their money back. As lead producer, he
takes responsibility for his productions and his
investors, and surrounds himself with frequent
collaborators. He stays involved through the
sales and marketing of his films, but knows
when to “let it go” and hand over to the experts.
Keep the Lights On took only around $ 2 50,000 at
the box office; still, with a strong cast on his side
and a network of financial supporters, Ira raised
about $ 1.7 million for Love Is Strange -vahiing his
work as he promised he would after Married Life.
On the back of a successful Sundance premiere,
it sold to Sony Classics and international
distributors (including Altitude, which won a
bidding war for UK rights); the US box office
is more than $ 2 million, and his investors
have made their money back - making it
financially his most successful film so far.
I asked if he would like to work in TV, or make
bigger-budgeted films (period, for example); an
audience member asked if he would ever revisit
any earlier, more expensive-to-shoot scripts. His
answer to both was “no”: he sees himself as an
independent filmmaker, making films for cinema,
in the spirit of Cassavetes, Fassbinder, Altman,
Ken Loach. TV and studio work hold no interest
for him because “if you direct for them, you work
for them”, and he wants to work for himself.
Is this indulgent? Unrealistic? I found it
inspiring. “We don’t have people like you,”
he said, referring to the lack of public film
funding in the US. But the upshot is that he
doesn’t expect anyone to help him get his films
made, and the hard work is all down to him.
It’s inspiring to see a filmmaker, faced with
such significant challenges, staring them
down and taking control. © @bf iben
IN PRODUCTION
# Corneliu Porumboiu, the Romanian
director of 12:08 East of Bucharest and Police,
Adjective, has started shooting his next
project. The Treasure, which “follows two men
as they face a series of misadventures in their
quest to find a treasure”. Filming will take place
in Romania, in Bucharest and the county of
Teleorman. No mention of the Sierra Madre...
# Sammo Hung is to return to directing
17 years after his last film. The martial arts
film star, producer, choreographer and
director, famed for work with Jackie Chan,
Shaw Brothers, John Woo, Bruce Lee and
many others, is making an action thriller.
The Bodyguard, starring Hung himself as an
amnesiac retired soldier who gets involved in
a war between Chinese and Russian gangs.
• Danny Boyle has reportedly snagged
Christian Bale to play Steve Jobs in Jobs,
his biopic of the late Apple chief. Jobs’s life
has already been put on screen in 2013’s
poorly received Jobs, which starred Ashton
Kutcher, but Boyle’s project sounds more
promising, boasting as it does a script by The
Social Network screenwriter Aaron Sorkin.
# Hugh Hudson, the British director of
Chariots of Fire and Revolution, is filming
his next feature, A/tam/ra, on location in
northern Spain. The film tells the story of
the discoveiy in 1879 of the prehistoric cave
paintings at the now world-famous Altamira
cave; the cast includes Antonio Banderas,
Rupert Everett and Golshifteh Farahani.
• Jacques Audiard has started production
on his seventh feature, Erran. Details are
scarce, but Audiard is directing from his
own script, and the story is rumoured to
be about a Sri Lankan Tamil fighter living
as a refugee in France, and working as a
caretaker on a rough estate in the Paris
suburbs. The stoiy - partly inspired by
Montesquieu’s Persian Letters (1721) - will
focus on culture shock and the refugee’s
perception of modern-day French society.
• Quentin Tarantino (below) is preparing to
start shooting his Wyoming-set western The
Hateful Eight this month. According to the
official synopsis, the film “follows the steadily
ratcheting tension that develops after a
blizzard diverts a stagecoach from its route,
and traps a pitiless and mistrustful group
that includes a competing pair of bounty
hunters, a renegade Confederate soldier, and
a female prisoner in a saloon in the middle of
nowhere”. The latest addition to the cast is
Jennifer Jason Leigh,
who joins other
rumoured cast
members Samuel
L. Jackson, Kurt
Russell, Tim Roth,
Michael Madsen
and Bruce Dern.
The film is due
out in late 2015.
16 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
golden dream
WINNER
OFFICIAL SELECTION - UN CERTAIN REGARD - CANNES FILM FESTIVAL
TALENT PRIZE
★★★★
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A FILM BY DIEGO QUEMADA-DIEZ
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The Guardian
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Empire
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INTELLIGENT DESIGN
THE
CREATION
0F200L
A SPACE
ODYSSEY
Stanley Kubrick was determined the design for his ‘definitive attempt’ at the science-fiction
film should represent a decisive break with Hollywood norms - and who better to enlist to his
cause than a pair of spacecraft consultants poached from the very heart of NASA itself?
Stanley Kubrick’s first choice of production designer
for ‘Journey Beyond the Stars’ (as 2001: A Space Odyssey
was then called) was Ken Adam. Kubrick and Adam
had developed a very intense working relationship on
Or. Strangelove, which was released at the end of January
1964. The two key sets in the film - the Pentagon War
Room with its giant poker table and the detailed two-tier
interior of the B-5 2 bomber - had attracted an unusual
amount of critical attention. So, at the end of July 1964,
Kubrick wrote to Adam, asking if he would consider de-
signing his next film project. Adam was very busy at the
time with The Ipcress File dcnA preparations for Thunder-
ball ducid besides could not “be expected to accept blindly
a very important position on a most difficult project,
which 1 know would require all my resources and inge-
nuity”. He was concerned that with “all kinds of research
at your disposal” and the input of specialists from NASA
there “would not be any room left for my imagination”.
Kubrick was already envisaging a realistic science-fiction
epic to be based on the latest discoveries; a fictional semi-
documentary on a colossal scale, preferably to be shown
on the widest screen there was. The wild expressionism
of Dr. Strangelove could scarcely be further from his inten-
tions. So Adam politely declined. Kubrick took this badly.
But before he wrote to Adam, in May 1964, he had
also corresponded with the Hollywood matte painter
and illustrator Chesley Bonestell, letting him know
about ‘Journey Beyond the Stars’: “1 am presently
working with [author] Arthur Clarke [since April
18 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
THE MAN IN THE RED SUIT
Keir Dullea as Dr Dave
Bowman in 2001: A Space
Odyssey (right); and concept
designs by Harry Lange for
the spacesuits and helmets
used in the film (below)
ni'/
KUBRICK & LANGE
THE DESIGN OF 2001
According to
Arthur C. Clarke,
where space
movies were
concerned, Kubrick
was ‘highly critical
of everything’,
always noting
the poor quality
of the design and
special effects
0 1964] on an idea for a science-fiction film, which
might prove to be the definitive attempt. I am, as
you might well imagine, enormously impressed by the
imagination and quality of your work. This is just a note
to... find out how to get in touch with you when the time
comes.”
Kubrick and Clarke had been viewing as many ‘space
movies’ as they could lay their hands on in New York,
including Destination Moon (1950) and Conquest of Space
(1955), both of which Bonestell had designed. Bonestell
had also illustrated a very influential eight-part series of
articles for Cc>//zer’s magazine, beginning in March 1952,
on the possibilities of space exploration, with much
of the promotional text provided by Dr Wernher von
Braun. Collier’s had a huge circulation and it has been
claimed of these articles that “no artist had more impact
on the emerging popular culture of space than Chesley
Bonestell”. According to Clarke, where the diet of space
movies was concerned, Kubrick was “highly critical of
everything”, always noting the poor quality of the design
and special effects and the puerility of the scripts. But
Destination Moon did capture his attention. As, it seems,
did Bonestell’s celebrated illustration of a large circular
revolving space station in Collier’s. Although Bonestell re-
plied, “1 would be glad to discuss it [the design of the proj-
ect] with you at any time,” the correspondence ended in
August 1964. Kubrick kept reproductions of Bonestell’s
paintings from the book The Conquest of Space among his
pre-production notes, and had a 3 5mm print of Destina-
tion Moon shipped over to MGM studios at Borehamwood
in September 1965. But, as Arthur C. Clarke noted, the re-
search context had changed beyond all recognition since
the mid-1950s, the heyday of space boosterism. Manned
space flights had been happening in the real world since
1961. “We were interested in starting where Destination
Moon finished,” he wrote.
THE ART OF SCIENCE
On 7 September 1964, shortly after Kubrick wrote to
Adam and Bonestell, he produced a “i 00-item question-
naire about our astronauts, eg do they sleep in their paja-
mas, what do they eat for breakfast, etc.” ‘Journey Beyond
the Stars’ would represent a decisive break with the usual
Hollywood ways of doing these things. It would present
technological and scientific change within conceiv-
able limits - designing a plausible future for filmgoers
who could well live to see it - and would have to work
punishingly hard to do so. Unlike earlier mainstream
science-fiction films, it would not attempt to break the
continuity of history: on the contrary, it would deliber-
ately mix the familiar (brands and products - to Western
eyes anyway) with the speculative. It would be obses-
sively detailed - not with scientific verisimilitude as an
end in itself, but as an aesthetic strategy. It would create
a visual world out of material things that had never been
seen in public quite like this before (except, occasion-
ally, at world’s fairs). Instead of Bonestell’s moonscape
of jagged mountains and parched mudflat surfaces, it
would feature rounded mountains and rubble - which
is what they really looked like, according to the latest
photographs supplied by the Department of Astronomy
at the University of Manchester and by the Soviet science
attache at the London embassy; these were the clearest
available images before the moon landing in 1969.
Enter Frederick 1. Ordway 111 and Harry (Hans-Kurt)
Lange, who happened to be in New York in January
1965 for talks with publishers about their latest book
project and for a conference on astronautics. They both
worked for the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight
Center in Huntsville, Alabama - Ordway on the com-
munications and networking side, liaising between the
predominantly German rocket scientists, business and
government; Lange as an illustrator of advanced space-
craft concepts for future projects graphics. Dr von Braun,
their boss, used Lange’s clever visualisations to help elicit
funding from Washington: “Harry,” he once said, “your
work makes money where everybody else spends it.” As
Lange himself put it, “1 made them to be as dramatic as
possible - to take to appropriation committees.” Ordway
and Lange had also set up in the mid-1950s, with some
colleagues, the grand-sounding General Aeronautics
Research Corporation, intended to produce publications
and consultancy: Ordway the words, Lange the pictures.
On 22 January 1965, they contacted Ordway’s friend
Arthur C. Clarke in New York, met him at the Harvard
Club, and mentioned that they were working together
on a book project Intelligence in the Universe. Ordway re-
calls: “That’s when he mentioned that he was working
with director Stanley Kubrick on a film which aimed to
be the science-fiction film, one which would be serious,
scientifically plausible and big budget. It would involve
other intelligences in space...”
Clarke contacted Kubrick and the four men met in the
director’s penthouse on East 84th Street the following af-
ternoon. “We took along the galleys and the pictures and
1 told him that I’d been working with von Braun at NASA
and that this was a little sideline here,” says Ordway.
After a “mentally exhilarating” conversation that
ranged across rocket science, ballistic missiles, comput-
ers and aliens, according to Lange, Kubrick studied his
pictures closely, looked him in the eye and announced:
“Well, 1 can get better illustrators in New York City a
dime a dozen, but they don’t have your NASA back-
ground, your combination. That’s what 1 need.”
Lange did not take offence. He flew back with Ordway
to Huntsville five days later, with a confidential copy of
Clarke’s long treatment of ‘Journey Beyond the Stars’
in his luggage. An airmail, by special delivery, soon ar-
rived confirming that Kubrick wanted to make a deal
with General Aeronautics for the services of both men.
By February it was clear that this would involve at least
80 per cent of their time, and with von Braun’s blessing
they signed a six-month contract with Polaris Films of
239 Central Park West. Ordway would provide scientific
advice and would liaise with his network of corporate
and government contacts in space and computer re-
search (the Kubrick Archive contains 300 files on prod-
uct development alone): a number of big corporations
had exhibited at the New York World’s Fair, which
opened on the same day as Clarke first met Kubrick, 22
April 1964, and the film made use of several of them.
Lange would design the space vehicles, environments
and space suits. A typically robust request for technical
help with some of the film’s designs, written by public-
ity director/vice-president of Polaris Roger Caras a few
months after Ordway and Lange had been signed up,
tried hard to distance the project from the usual cliches
of ‘science fiction’: “The film will operate without the
20 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (2)/K0BAL COLLECTION (i)
assistance of Mickey Mouse, Buck Rogers, Russian spies.
Jack Armstrong the All-American Boy [a radio and movie
serial adventure hero], moths, butterflies and bumble-
bees destroying cities and raping Japanese women. In
short [the film] will be a logical extension of today’s
rapidly developing techniques and technologies.”
Lange started serious work on the design of the six
main vehicles featured in the treatment in February
1965. They were the Orion 111 earth-to-orbit shuttle;
Space Station One (later V) in orbit around the earth;
the Aries iB earth-orbit-to-lunar surface spacecraft;
the lunar surface bus used to move people and materi-
als; the large Discovery One interplanetary spaceship
and its small round (originally rectangular) Space Pods
“with extendable arms” for maintenance and local
exploration. Work was also underway on a friendly,
female-voiced computer called Athena (later the more
malign HAL) and spacewear for scientists on the moon
and astronauts aboard Discovery. By April, according to
Clarke’s log, “the walls [of the Polaris office] are getting
covered with impressive pictures...”
Lange recalled that these had to be both detailed and
rigorously defensible: “A lot of other people would have
thought, ‘Well, we’ll just have a little black panel there
and paint it black, and then stick some blue squares on
it, that’s it, you make one or two of them light up.’
But that’s for television, and they can get away
SITTING PRETTY
Chair concepts for the
Orion III space shuttle,
showing details of the
arm rest console (left) by
production designer Harry
Lange (opposite); the chairs
as seen in 2001: A Space
Odyssey (above)
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 21
KUBRICK & LANGE
THE DESIGN OF 2001
STATION TO STATION
1. A concept drawing of the
side view and cross section
of the Command Module
2. Early concept drawings for
the Orion III space shuttle
3. The final design for Space
Station V, including side
elevations 4. The Orion III
space shuttle in 2001: A
Space Odyssey 5. Space
Station V as seen in the film
22 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
© with it because it’s a little bitty screen; but this
was Cinerama, the wraparound, and you don’t get
away with it. It had to be absolutely perfect and Stanley
was a great stickler for detail.”
This was an understatement. Large would produce
“small thumbnail sketches”, which he would discuss
with Kubrick, then more sketches, then semi-developed
drawings - still with plenty of options - and finally, or
almost finally, detailed technical specifications and in
some cases paintings. Kubrick would often ask him to
work on visual ideas even though he was pretty sure
he did not like them - because only by actually seeing
Lange’s drawings could he make up his mind.
What did Kubrick feel about working with such close
associates of von Braun, one of whom was German?
After all. Dr. Strangelove, as played so memorably by
Peter Sellers, had in many ways been a wheelchair-bound
caricature of von Braun. Peter George’s novelisation of
the screenplay - then recently published - was in no
doubt about this. Sellers was to state categorically, “It was
always Wemher von Braun”, and Ken Adam confirms it.
He should know: the two men went to the same school in
Berlin in the 1920s. Ordway recalls: “Of course, Kubrick
was Jewish and Harry would come in with Germanic
clothes sometimes. There was a time when he even wore
Bavarian jackets! But they got along fine. Stanley would
sometimes say to me, ‘Well 1 don’t think 1 ever imagined
I’d be working this close to a German’.”
For obvious reasons, there would be no more gags
about von Braun and involuntary Nazi salutes - even if
Lange did sometimes come to work looking like Baron
von Trapp.
Tony Masters arrivedinNew York in April 1965, to head
up the art department, in the same month as the change
of title to 2001: A Space Odpssep. Kubrick had asked Ken
Adam at the beginning of February to recommend a list
of British production designers who had a proven track-
record in organising complex productions, running a
large budget and understanding the technologies of film-
making: “If the stress must be on the creative or the other
elements [technical and cost] 1 think 1 would prefer the
technical side... Keep in mind the personality of the old
maestro and how it might mesh with your choices.”
Masters had worked on The Dap the Earth Caught Fire
and (uncredited) for David Lean on Lawrence of Arabia.
From April onwards, all Lange’s designs would be sub-
mitted through him, and under his management put
into highly coloured pictorial formats - sci-fi cover-art
style - by the illustrators Richard McKenna and Roy
Camon. As Ordway remembers, “Harry had the ultimate
design of all the space elements - because he had the ex-
perience of working in that area.” Masters acknowledged
that “Harry put the authenticity into it”, and that when
they were all working together as a team, they began to
design within his visual idiom.
One problem was that Lange had never designed for a
film before. “1 was not a professional,” he later admitted,
“1 was a spacecraft designer, visualisation expert, what-
ever you want to call it. 1 certainly knew nothing [at the
outset] about how to... make it into a film set.”
The presence of Masters in New York, two months
in, helped him through this brave new world of film, as
did Kubrick’s persistence as “a good taskmaster”,
Eventually, over at Borehamwood, the director
A TRIP TO THE MOON
An early concept design by
Harry Lange for the monolith
(top); an early Lange sketch
of the moon base and moon
bus, with the excavated
trench in the distance
(middle); and moon base
personnel visit the monolith
in 2001: A Space Odyssey;
Kubrick on the set of the
moon base (overleaf)
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 23
KUBRICK & LANGE
THE DESIGN OF 2001
The production
designer Harry
Lange certainly
brought
authenticity to
the project -some
of his drawings
may well have
been submitted for
security clearance
to NASA
O managed to persuade the union - not easy to do -
to allow Lange the credit ‘production designer’, on
the grounds that by then he had served his time for two
years. Ordway remained happy to be billed as ‘scientific
consultant’.
Lange certainly brought authenticity to the project.
Ordway confirms that some of his drawings may well
have been submitted for security clearance to NASA,
based as they were on classified information - and
this was, after all, still at the height of the Cold War. He
brought a ‘look’ as well: clinical, ice-cool, eggshell white
rather than the shiny steel of traditional sci-fi rockets. He
tended to deny, in interviews, that this was a matter of
styling. Design in space films, he always said, was about
purpose and function, and “only out of that comes a style
of its own”. Beauty was a by-product. But he did concede
that part of the job was to make the vehicles, interiors and
spacesuits /oo/:functional and ‘technical’, involving choic-
es about what would work best on the screen. The results
have since been called ‘Project Modernism’. Kubrick put
it differently: “1 think there were two problems with the
design of anything [in 2001]. One was, ‘Is there anything
about it that would be logically inconsistent with what
people felt would actually exist?’ and the other one was,
‘Would it be interesting? Would it look nice?”’
By the time of the move to MGM Borehamwood -
Lange in July 1965, Ordway in August - much of the
design work on the vehicles had been completed, ready
for the model-making shops and set builders. The six-
month contract was turning into two years plus. There
were still some important design decisions to be made,
especially about the second half of the film. Would Dis-
covery be powered by nuclear propulsion? Would her
destination be Jupiter or Saturn? How much emphasis
would there be on the ‘hibernaculum’ in space? Would
there be a sequence set at the World Space Center in New
York, involving establishing shots of the street? Would
Bowman descend into a Stargate on Jupiter V and find
himself in an extraterrestrial civilisation? Some of these
were being actively debated only weeks before the start
of filming on 29 December 1965. But the bulk of the
vehicle and spacesuit designs were created between Feb-
ruary and July 1 965. They had to be...
When it was all over, early in 1967, Ordway returned
to his full-time job at NASA, while Lange decided to stay
in England and continue as a designer for film, special-
ising in space hardware (The Empire Strikes Back, The
Return of the Jedi, Moonraker). Robert O’Brien, the amaz-
ingly patient head of MGM, summarised the 2001 saga
in a famous Variety interview: “Why have Buck Rogers
for six million dollars, when you can have Stanley Ku-
brick for seven million dollars?” In point of fact, the film
cost $10.5 million, of which an estimated $6.5 million
was spent on “artefacts and sets and camerawork and
special effects photography”. Von Braun was reported to
be pleased with the result. ©
© Thanks to the Stanley Kubrick Archive, Sir Ken
Adam and the late Fred Ordway. Christopher
Frayling’s The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the Design
of the Landmark Science Fiction Film - featuring
Lange’s unpublished archive of drawings - will be
published by Reel Art Press in March 2025.2001: A
Space Odyssey is rereleased by the BFI in UK
cinemas on 28 November.
DAVID AND
HIS GOLIATHS
In this extract from an essay in ‘Sight
& Sound’ in spring ig 66 , ‘Two for
the sci-fi, David Robinson describes
Kubrick’s tireless pefectionism,
which he observed during a visit to
the set of ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’
The sets spectacularly monopolise most
of the stages at MGM Elstree studios... The
space lounge set is almost 1 50 feet long; and
the floor is constructed in an arc which gives
strange, giddying effects if you attempt to
walk up or down it. There are moon-stations
and spacecraft of equally daunting scale. The
most staggering set constructed for the film
is, however, the great centrifuge, designed
and built for the film by Vickers Armstrong.
It looks rather like a fairground big wheel
of exceptional bulk, heavily studded with
arc lights and back projection devices and
festooned with swags of cable. The wheel
itself stands 3 6 feet high - half as tall again,
roughly, as the rooftop of a reasonably sized
two-storey house. The working area of the
set is the inner part of the wheel or drum,
which can be rotated in either direction at
a pretty fair pace. This operation is quite
alarming. Movement is at all times heralded
by a warning hooter of eerie pitch and
piercing volume; and the wheel picks up
speed with disconcerting muted creaks
and grunts. Clearly it could be dangerous;
and to add to the menace of the thing, the
technicians who work inside it wear heavy
crash helmets. The actors are not so protected.
Kubrick at work on his stages has rather
the air of a David embattled with several
Goliaths, or, perhaps, Quixote tilting at the
windmills. Sometimes the machines seem
to be getting the upper hand. Shooting
was held up for nearly a fortnight because
the centrifuge, it seemed, simply would
not be finished. But if Kubrick seems to
be battling with his machinery, it is at
least a contest of his own setting-up; and
probably one that excites and extends him.
Kubrick, currently wearing a beard, looks
rather like Orson Welles playing a short man,
or else Buhuel’s younger brother. On the
set he is quiet, severe, giving an impression
of being rather forbearing than actually
patient (which is his reputation) and keeping
himself, for the most part, to himself. It
seems no accident that he has an assistant
director of NCO firmness. The New York Times
Magazine mdide great play of the “awe” in
which his collaborators hold him; and you
feel that this is the sort of relationship that
24 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Wheel of fortune: 200Ts centrifuge on the set at MGM Elstree studios
he encourages. Only occasional small jokes
break the intensity of his concentration and
suggest that his work actually gives him
pleasure. In between attending to everything
else, he is forever snatching up a Polaroid
camera and snapping off photographs,
some apparently for immediate reference,
but others, it seems, simply as stills.
His attention to detail is legendary, and
extends from close control over every
technical aspect to minute observations
of the actors’ presence and performance.
A scene with William Sylvester, already
meticulously set up and rehearsed, was
reshot several times because Kubrick was
not happy with the way the moisture in
the corner of the actor’s eye glistened; and
then again reshot because Kubrick felt that
Sylvester gave an inflection that was vaguely
British to a line of very little importance.
Actors speak highly of Kubrick, and there
is no doubt that their performances may
often owe much to his care for detail in
directing them. It must also be fairly gruelling
at times. Another scene 1 watched required
a supporting player to address a scientific
congress. The lines set down for him were
already trying enough: “In this stressful
environment for HAL, we suspect that your
threat of disconnection might have been the
proverbial last straw. HAL had not known
unconsciousness since his operational
acceptance. This might have seemed for him
the equivalent of death as we know it...”
Constant reiteration under Kubrick’s
fierce eye rapidly reduced the actor to a
terrible series of fluffed deliveries, not
helped by Kubrick’s progressive revisions
of the lines during rehearsals, or by his
rather unconvincing reassurances. (“Cut
it... Pretty nice though... Now you’re doing
sump’n funny with your eyes... Now you’re
getting a bit public speakerish... Now you
sound a little sad... Wanna try it again?...
You sound like you’re reading a eulogy. Very
sombre. Just keep it factual, casual.. Just
try it once more without the camera...”)
Kubrick in fact appears happiest when faced
with a direct technical challenge; and 2001
provides him with several. As one instance,
the space suits devised for Keir Dullea and
Gary Lockwood have to have their own air
supply; and when the actors are in them,
only Kubrick can communicate with them
through two-way transmitters fixed in the
suits. Despite the immediate difficulties,
Kubrick looks appreciably gayer directing on
the centrifuge stage, imposing as it does quite
exceptional working conditions. There is only
room for the actors and the camera inside the
set, so the director and the main technical unit
must sit inside a sort of cage at some distance
from the set, watching on the monitor...
and communicating with the actors and
Only occasional small jokes
break the intensity of Kubrick’s
concentration and suggest his
work actually gives him pleasure
cameraman by microphones and headsets.
The day 1 watched Kubrick on set he was
shooting a scene in which Gary Lockwood
was doing track exercises around the inside
rim of the centrifuge. The set-up required that
as the wheel moved round, Lockwood ran in
the opposite direction so as to maintain his
position on one spot; while the camera was
moved so as also to keep in position a little
ahead of him. Since the camera was shooting
on its side, the effect was that the camera
was tracking back around a (comparatively
speaking) stationary centrifuge, to show
Lockwood running around the side, holding
to the floor by the centrifugal force of the
vehicle’s movement in space. The effect,
heightened by the strains of a Chopin
waltz (shades of Strangelove) played by
Kubrick on a small portable player, was
unexpectedly comic on the screen. Kubrick
was evidently fascinated by the prospects of
editing this material and seeing the effects of
conventional cutting with such a set-up. ©
0 T 0 read more in the S&S and MFB archive,
visitbfi.org.uk/sightandsound/subscribe
Master and commander: Kubrick with Keir Dullea on the set
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 25
JUSTICE IS BLIND
Kolia (Alexsey Serebryakov)
suffers a series of
unwarranted misfortunes
in Andrey Zvyagintsev’s
Leviathan, earning him
comparisons with the long-
suffering Job in the bible
26 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
HERE
BE
MONSTERS
‘Leviathan’, Andrey Zvyagintsev’s tense
drama about a man struggling to save his
family home from a tyrannical mayor in a
village on the Barents Sea, offers a savage
portrait of the corruption and lawlessness
endemic in contemporary Russian society
By Ian Christie
Leviathan has appeared in many guises down the ages.
After a striking debut as a biblical monster in the Book of
Job, it doubles as Satan in Milton’s Paradise Lost dtnd pro-
vides the arresting title of Thomas Hobbes’s i yth-century
treatise on political theory. Later, and more literally, it’s
Melville’s great whale, the hero of countless comics and
pop songs, and even the title of a novel by Paul Auster.
But just what kind of monster is it in Andrey Zvyagint-
sev’s imposing fourth feature?
There are certainly whales, both in Russia’s Arctic Bar-
ents Sea and on its debris-strewn coast, which is the film’s
setting. But this is not a tale of hardy fisherfolk, even if
one of the main characters works in a cannery. As in all
of Zvyagintsev’s films, its focus is on a tightly knit web of
troubled family relations.
Kolia meets his friend off the train; a friend who once
served under him in the army, we learn, but who is now
a seemingly successful lawyer in Moscow. Dmitri has
come to help Kolia in the final stage of his legal battle
to keep hold of the wooden house that has been in his
family for generations and overlooks the town.
The battle has almost certainly already been lost, how-
ever, as Dmitri warns Kolia before a court appearance of
farcical formality. The town’s mayor, a bloated tyrant, has
his eye on the site for his own corrupt purposes, so no
appeal to law or sentiment is likely to succeed - unless,
that is, Dmitri can dish enough dirt on the mayor to force
a deal, and then manage to survive the consequences.
Meanwhile Kolia’s younger wife, stepmother to his re-
bellious son, watches warily as the stakes escalate.
A family apparently at peace, but still disturbed by
unhealed traumas from the past is what we’ve come
to expect from Zvyagintsev. In his haunting debut. The
Return (2003), a long-absent father took his sons on a
mysterious trip to the coast; while in The Banishment
(2007), set in a composite, deliberately non-specific land-
scape, a man and woman struggle after her confession
of infidelity. With his third film, Elena (2011), Zvyagint-
sev moved closer to the social reality of contemporary
Russia, as a woman is driven to murder her wealthy
husband in order to secure an inheritance for her son
from a previous relationship. Leviathan manages, more
successfully, to balance the universality the director has
always striven for with a brilliantly etched microcosm of
the lawlessness that grips Russia today, where patronage,
power and profiteering are closely intertwined.
Zvyagintsev has already suffered (and probably
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 27
ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV
LEVIATHAN
© benefited too) from the near-inevitable compari-
sons with Tarkovsky. Stately, ‘slow’ by some stan-
dards, and relentlessly solemn, his films propose serious
themes. These are definitely more Dostoevskian than
Chekhovian, and indeed the director has obligingly
quoted the author of Crime and Punishment aX a festival
screening of Leviathan: “Only through the fantastic can
you get to the depth of truth.” In fact, there seems rela-
tively little fantasy in the tightly wound plotting of the
new film, which shows just how terrifyingly anarchic
even the farthest corners of Russia can be today. The
mayor meets his clients and berates his underlings be-
neath a portrait of Putin, just as his predecessors in the
Soviet era would have done beneath a portrait of Lenin,
Stalin or Brezhnev.
The autocratic power he wields is also similar to that
of his forerunners, and there are echoes in Leviathan of
some brave older challenges to Soviet complacency,
such as Abdrashitov’s A Train Has Stopped (1982) and
Klimov’s Farewell (igSs). The wall of provincial silence
that Abdrashitov’s investigator meets after a train crash
and Klimov’s elegy for a village about to be flooded in the
name of progress both prefigure the closed, hierarchical
world portrayed in Leviathan. Except, as Zvyagintsev has
said in an interview with Anne Thompson, the current
situation maybe harder to fathom and to fight: “Imagine
a situation where 1 work for a firm which belongs to a
larger holding group which belongs to a certain person
in turn. 1 don’t need to be told how to vote. 1 automati-
cally assume my vote has to align with whatever the
wishes are of the larger thing that ultimately 1 belong to.”
What happens when individuals resist the pressure to
bow to corrupt local officialdom was also the theme of
Boris Khlebnikov’s ironically titled A Long and Happy Life
(2013), similarly filmed in the far north, near Murmansk.
There, an idealistic city-dweller takes over the running of
a former collective farm and appears to win the support
of his workers when the call comes to sell out, only to
discover that everyone has their price in today’s Russia.
But here, some caution is needed. Anyone trying to diag-
nose the state of Putin’s Russia from a handful of films
should pause and reflect how reliably, for instance, Brit-
ain’s cinema portrays the moral and political climate of
the country.
There is indeed much more to Leviathan than its
portrayal of cronyism and the misuse of public power
- which is far from unique to post-Soviet Russia. One
aspect, however, which is defiantly Russian is the insti-
tution of a hunting trip as a barely disguised excuse to do
some serious drinking. Celebrated in Aleksandr Rogozh-
kin’s domestic hit comedy Peculiarities ofthe National Hunt
(1995) and its sequels, this custom provides Leviathan
with both an episode of wry comedy, when one of the
‘hunters’ opens up with an automatic assault rifle, and
the framing of the emotional vortex that will tear Kolia’s
fragile family apart.
Less familiar - indeed conspicuously missing from
most recent Russian films - is the growing importance
of the Orthodox church in contemporary Russia. The
church makes a number of appearances throughout
Leviathan and plays a more complex role than some crit-
ics have implied. Certainly the senior cleric we see as a
confidant of the mayor seems not only to be comfort-
able with earthly power but to embody the conservative
vision of ‘holy Russia’ that lashed out after the 2012 Pussy
Riot protest in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Sav-
iour, itself a showcase for the new church-state alliance.
There’s a distant echo ofthe great confrontation between
Eisenstein’s Tsar Ivan and his former friend Kolychev,
now a disapproving archbishop, when Zvyagintsev’s
mayor bows to the bishop’s insistence on being guided
by God in his affairs. But there is also another aspect of
the church’s presence in this depressed village, perhaps
reflecting the director’s own professed faith. As Kolia’s
woes multiply, he encounters a priest buying bread in
the local supermarket, apparently to distribute to the
poor, and this - distinctly Dostoevskian - encounter re-
inforces the film’s underlying theme.
Zvyagintsev’s intriguing title, we are told, is both a
reference to the sea-monster evoked by God in his final
speech to Job, and to Hobbes’s defence of the social con-
tract, written during the English Civil War. Kolia, suffer-
ing a series of unwarranted misfortunes, has been com-
pared to a latter-day Job, although this analogy seems
sketchy at best. The core idea of an ordinary citizen
driven to desperate measures by injustice seems to draw
on a combination of Heinrich von Kleist’s novella Mi-
chael Kohlhaas, based on the true story of a 16th-century
German rebel against authority, and the real-life tale of
Marvin Heemeyer, described by Zvyagintsev as “a Colo-
rado man who was a welder and owned an automotive
repair shop, who went on a rampage with a tractor in
2004 after the local authorities gave permission to con-
struct a factory that blocked the entrance to his shop. He
bulldozed the town hall, the factory and other buildings,
then killed himself.”
Kolia behaves neither like Job, Kohlhaas nor Heemey-
er, indicating that these were only starting points for
a story that is certainly not confined to any single cul-
ture - it fuels Jia Zhangke’s explosive A Touch of Sin, an-
The tightly wound
plot of ‘Leviathan’
shows just how
terrifyingly
anarchic the
farthest comers
of Russia can
be today
FAMILY AFFAIRS
In his previous films - (from
left) The Return (2003),
The Banishment (2007)
and Elena (2011) - director
Andrey Zvyagintsev (above)
explored families who are
seemingly at peace, but still
disturbed by past traumas
28 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (3)
other recent protest against corrupt power - but which
Zvyagintsev and his co-writer Oleg Negin have given
a strong sense of Russian abjection. And of all the
references invoked, the most relevant is surely Hob-
bes’s argument that only “that great Leviathan called
a common-wealth or state” in which all play their part
responsibly, can protect the individual from a life that
is otherwise, in the famous phrase, “solitary, poor, nasty,
brutish and short”.
The succession of Zvyagintsev’s titles alone points to
an eschatological bent and a Tarkovskian desire to create
parables. The father of The Retumis rhymed visually with
Mantegna’s The Dead Christ, while the title of TheBanish-
mentrefers to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden
of Eden, and in it there are two Leonardo references - a
jigsaw puzzle of The Annunciation, and a photograph of
the drawing of St Anne and Mary, which Zvyagintsev
drew attention to in an interview with James Norton as
one “I’m unhappy that nobody has so far noticed”. Elena,
apparently standing apart from this theme, was original-
ly devised in response to an invitation to contribute to a
group of films dealing with apocalypse - so we may per-
haps read it as a kind of domestic apocalypse, in which
the wife destroys the family in order to save it.
Leviathan once again asks us to think beyond the film’s
narrative, to ponder the allegorical allusions (encour-
aged by the poster image, showing a whale’s skeleton
on a beach), and no doubt to see Kolia and his family as
tragic victims of a corrupt polity. But Zvyagintsev is less
a philosopher or a social critic - the film received state
funding and has been cleared for release in Russia, de-
spite recent legislation against swearing that seemed to
threaten it - than a powerful director of actors and cre-
ator of incomparable filmic landscapes. All the actors in
Leviathan are outstanding, with the central four - Alex-
sey Serebryakov as the increasingly tormented Kolia,
Vladimir Vdovichenkov as his friend Dmitri, Elena
Lyadova as Lilya and Roman Madyanov as the bullying
mayor Vadim - surrounded by a larger cast of supporting
players than hitherto in Zvyagintsev’s work.
After the elaborate artificiality of The Banishment and
the predominantly urban realist setting of Elena, Levia-
than comes back to the elemental landscape and post-
industrial seashore of The Return and, crucially, to the
houses that have been at the heart of his vision. Kolia’s
wooden house is the centre of his life and a link with Rus-
sia’s past, now being destroyed in pursuit of profit and os-
tentation. We know that The Sacrifice is one of Zvyagint-
sev’s key referents, with its focus on an archetypal house,
but there are many other domestic spaces that make
‘home’ a central Tarkovskian theme. With Kolia’s embat-
tled home at the visual, emotional and political centre of
Leviathan, Zvyagintsev has created a film that may speak
as eloquently to his fellow Russians as Tarkovsky’s Mirror
once did, and its final fate may serve as an apt metaphor
for the condition of that enigmatic land. ©
O Leviathan is released in UK cinemas on
7 November and is reviewed on page 77
CORRUPTION AND DECAY
(Clockwise from top left)
Roman Madyanov as the
bullying mayor Vadim in
Leviathan; Sergey Pokhodaev
as Kolia’s teenage son Roma
surveying the remains of a
whale; Elena Lyadova
as Lilya; and the film’s
village location in Russia
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 29
With echoes of Shakespeare, Chekhov and
Bergman, Nuri Bilge Ceplan’s ‘Winter Sleep’
is a claustrophobic, psychologicallp acute
chamber drama exploring the self-delusions
and failed relationships of a proud, vain
hotelier in an isolated region of Turkey.
By Geoff Andrew
As widely noted at the time, it was no great surprise when
Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Winter Sleep won this year’s Cannes
Palme d’Or. After all, since first appearing in the main
Competition with Distant (Uzak, 2002), which carried
off both the Grand Prix and the Best Actor prizes, he’d
won most of the festival’s major awards. Besides, many
felt Once Upon a Time inAnatoliawould have nabbed the
big one in 201 1, had Terrence Malick not made his long-
awaited return to filmmaking with the emphatically
ambitious Tree of Life. So hopes for Winter Sleep woro
high. Not for the first time, the predictions were right:
the most prestigious of all festival prizes confirmed, if
confirmation were still needed, that the remarkably
consistent achievements of the Turkish writer-director
had earned him a place among the most distinguished
artists working in film today.
But what of the film itself? As ever with Ceylan, it
shows him remaining absolutely true to his abiding
concerns while at the same time challenging himself
- and his audience. Centred on Ay din (Haluk Bilginer,
familiar in the 80s to British television audiences as
Mehmet in EastEnders), a retired middle-aged actor living
with his younger wife Nihal (Melisa Sozen) and divorcee
sister Necla (Demet Akbag) at his remote boutique
hotel in Cappadocia, the film is another of Ceylan’s
piercingly astute, often affectionately witty studies in
pride, vanity, insecurity and self-deception - especially
(but not exclusively) of the masculine variety. The
setting may seem a cosy haven from the hubbub of the
modern world, but the warm, firelit interiors can have
a suffocatingly claustrophobic effect, especially when
tensions steadily mount, both within the household and
in Ay din’s dealings with some of his tenants, after a boy
hurls a stone at his car windscreen. It’s not only the glass
that is damaged...
Ceylan’s customary analytical (but never judgemental)
interest in individual psychology and moral nuance,
underpinned by his firm grasp of social delineation and
interaction, ensures that the film’s focus on Ay din and
a few others resonates rather more widely; it’s not only
about very particular familial problems but a reflection
on privilege and poverty, commitment and scepticism,
success and failure, response and responsibility. In
these regards, as in its open nod to Chekhov (whose
name again appears in the closing credits), it’s wholly in
keeping with Ceylan’s earlier work. Where it differs is in
its more abundant talk and its (intentionally) oppressive
interiority and audacious pacing; as in Anatolia, some
scenes last long enough to begin to test our patience,
just as the conversations they chronicle test that of the
characters. When at one point we’re suddenly out
in the sunlight following a stallion speeding over a
30 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
PIECE
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 31
NURI BILGE CEYLAN
WINTER SLEEP
O steppe, the sense of liberation is truly exhilarating.
Writing, as he has since Climates {2006), with
his wife Ebru, Ceylan has again drawn on the kind of
people, places and situations he knows from personal
experience to fashion a film of far wider import: though
marooned in deepest Cappadocia, his characters might
be living more or less anywhere. Notwithstanding its rich
echoes of Chekhov, Bergman, Shakespeare and others, it
becomes clear from the first few scenes that nobody else
could have made this particular chamberwork, such is
the meticulous attention to every small but significant
detail, to a visual beauty that’s never merely picturesque,
and to an account of human foibles that’s at once
painfully honest and admirably compassionate.
Our interview took place in Cannes several days before
Winter Sleep won the Palme d’Or. Though Ceylan seemed
relaxed and fairly pleased with the film, he evidently had
no expectations regarding its potential as a prize-winner.
GA: How did the film come about?
NBC: It’s inspired by several short stories by Chekhov.
In fact. I’d been thinking about one of the stories for 1 5,
maybe 1 6 years, but until now 1 felt it was very difficult to
turn into a film. Nothing very much actually happens in
the story, and while Chekhov is able to describe emotions
in such a way that you understand them, when you’re so
dependent on dialogue it can be less clear. But finally, 1
felt sufficiently confident to make a film out of it; then,
of course, 1 altered everything - changed characters,
introduced new stories, things like that. First Ebru and
1 wrote the overall story, then for each scene we began
to write the dialogue. She’d write her version. I’d write
mine, then we’d compare them. And the battle begins!
Our morning discussions are to test out what we’ve
written. It’s by arguing about a scene that we make it
deeper; also, we’re able to see it from both the man’s and
the woman’s point of view. So for each scene, we did this
many times, rewriting the dialogue over and over, and in
the end we had a script twice as long as the one for Once
Upon a Time in Anatolia. Then 1 shot around 200 hours of
footage. So I’d no idea how long the film would turn out.
My first cut was four and a half hours, then 1 got it down
to three and a quarter hours.
GA: Was Aydin your starting point and main focus?
NBC: Yes. The Turkish word ‘apdin’ means intellectual, so
that’s why we gave him that name. 1 know this character
very well - from my own personality, and from my
friends. 1 feel he’s one of us. All human beings have very
complex natures, and that’s what 1 wanted to look at.
GA: Someone asked me if the film says anything about
contemporary Turkey. How would you answer that?
NBC: Well, Aydin is a very typical modern Turkish
intellectual, and there’s a big gap between him and the
poor people in the village. But this kind of gap between
the educated well-off and the poor exists in most
countries; it’s not just Turkey. Then there’s the fact that
he’s apparently not religious but writes about religious
matters. In Turkey, if you’re Muslim, you’re not really free
to write about religion. Sometimes people have an urge
to speak out about religion - partly, perhaps, to show that
they’re not afraid to do so. Aydin is perhaps fairly typical
in that he wants to be seen as a bit of a hero because he
writes about religion, but at the same time there’s a part
of him that’s quite cautious or timid. He wants to fight
the fear he feels, but it still shows.
32 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
GA: Haluk Bilginer, who plays Aydin, used to be in a British
soap called EastEnders. Is that why you have Aydin say he
never took roles in any soaps?
NBC: No, I didn’t know he’d been in that series. I wrote
that line because it implies he wasn’t really successful
as an actor. He says he doesn’t like soaps; what he’s not
saying is that he hasn’t been getting any offers of work -
even for soaps. That’s why he’s at the hotel, and why he
speaks so idealistically about theatre acting.
GA: You used to like casting your family and friends for
your actors; here, as in your last film, you used seasoned
professionals.
NBC: Well, we wanted the dialogue to be spoken
exactly as written, with no changes. When such long
conversations are involved, only professionals can do
that. So we went for the best...
GA: Some scenes must have been very demanding in terms
of getting the subtle mood shifts right. Did you rehearse
much?
NBC: Not before the shoot, if that’s what you mean. We
just had the main actors read through the script two
or three times. 1 don’t like to do too much beforehand.
At that point it feels artificial. Besides, 1 find myself
beginning to hate the script. 1 just needed them to come
prepared to memorise the dialogue for those long scenes.
GA: Did you always think the film would have rather more
dialogue than your previous work?
NBC: Yes, 1 wanted to try that. But it’s not just a question
of the amount of dialogue; it’s the kind of dialogue,
which in this case is more literary, sometimes even quite
philosophical. That was a big risk; most of the time such
dialogue doesn’t really work in cinema, where we’re
more used to hearing the language of the streets. But 1
wanted to do something different this time.
When 1 started making films, the dialogue in most
Turkish movies was poor and not at all believable. For
many of us it felt important to bring in more naturalistic
dialogue - the language of the streets. So now there’s
generally no problem with the dialogue in Turkish films.
That being the case, this time around 1 wanted to have
the freedom to use another kind of language, such as
you might find, for instance, in a novel. Now that may
not be the language of the streets, but you do find it in
real life, especially when educated people who consider
themselves intellectuals get together. 1 was always very
concerned about whether 1 could make such language
work. It’s why Ebru and 1 discussed the dialogue so
much. Sometimes she’d feel a scene needed more street
language and I’d reject that argument; where 1 did, 1 take
full responsibility for the results. Of course, 1 don’t know
if it works or not.
GA: I think it does; it shows how we modify the way we
speak according to the situation we’re in. But it’s not only
more literary. More than their predecessors, the characters
in this film tend to say what they mean. Also, they use lan-
guage for reasons of power: Aydin, for example, always likes
to have the last word.
NBC: But as in the earlier films, they all still deceive each
other, and themselves. Moreover, because they know
each other well, they all understand that this is what’s
happening. For instance, the sister wants to go back to
her husband, but knows the others will think she’s weak
if she does that, so she makes out it’s her husband who
wants her back - but obviously the others can see what
she’s doing. Meanwhile, Aydin tells his sister many
things that aren’t true - and she doesn’t let him get away
with that. This kind of thing happens all the time in life.
Like everyone, 1 deceive myself a lot, because 1 try to pro-
tect myself; Of course, in real life we find that both neces-
sary and useful. But in cinema it’s important to face up to
the truth and show what’s really going on. That, for me,
is one of the aims of art.
GA: Did you worry about the film being so long?
NBC: Of course. No one in the industry likes long films.
The distributors, the cinema-owners, television - they
all hate them. Most of the audience don’t like long films.
But 1 like the challenge. 1 like to have the freedom a
novelist has. And here, the story insisted on being long,
so what could 1 do? Besides, after the first few months of
its theatrical release, a film has a different life on DVD
or online, so you can watch it in fragments if you prefer.
We rarely read novels in one sitting; why shouldn’t we be
able to watch films that way too? So in the longer
term, the duration of a film is not so problematic.
The distributors,
the cinema-
owners, television
- they all hate
long films. Most of
the audience don’t
like them. But I
like the challenge
IN A LONELY PLACE
Although the majority of
Winter Sleep (below) takes
place in the claustrophobic
interiors of Aydin’s hotel
in Cappadocia, the film
changes gear when Nuri
Bilge Ceylan (left) takes
the drama outside
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 33
NURI BILGE CEYLAN
WINTER SLEEP
O GA: How important was it to shoot in that very
striking location in Cappadocia?
NBC: Actually, 1 didn’t want to shoot there; it felt too
beautiful, too interesting. So 1 looked at many places for
the hotel setting, but in the end 1 couldn’t find another
that was right. 1 not only needed a place that was very
isolated; there also had to be a good reason for tourists
to come to such a remote place. In the end this one was
our best option; it was some way from town and had a
landscape tourists would want to visit. The tourists were
important because 1 wanted there to be people Aydin
might bump into after a fight with his sister, people to
whom he’d have to be polite at all times. To me that’s
almost a kind of alienation, part of life’s dark side. 1 find
it very hard to be social if 1 feel troubled or sad.
So that’s why we went with this location. But in the
end 1 liked it a lot; also, 1 don’t show the landscape very
much anyway.
GA: Much of it is a very interior film. The hotel seems cosy
at first, but then you make it feel claustrophobic. When
tensions arise, we want to get outside, and when we do we
feel a kind of freedom...
NBC: Yes. And then there’s the snow. That helped a lot. 1
wanted there to be snow, especially when Aydin leaves
the house. When he decides he must change his life, it’s
important that the world feels a very different place. All
that white. It makes him wonder whether he really wants
to go back to Istanbul, what the appeal of that world is. At
my age 1 know how he feels. 1 don’t mean that with regard
to Istanbul, but more generally: there comes a time when
you feel you are being pushed away from life, by your age.
GA: Indeed! Let’s change the subject. Your use of colour and
lighting seems more naturalistic than in your last two films.
NBC: Well, 1 wanted it to be naturalistic in Once Upon
a Time in Anatolia too, but sometimes the technology
wouldn’t allow that; in some scenes the colour grading
was quite strange. Three Monkeys, of course, wasn’t
naturalistic - but 1 don’t like that look any more in terms
of colour.
As for Winter Sleep, it’s not just the colour but the style
overall. 1 wanted it to be more neutral, less visible; not to
draw attention to itself. So 1 tried to make it more typi-
cal. Shot-reverse shot for conversations. Some long takes,
because 1 really wanted some of the conversations to feel
long - though in life, obviously, they often last much
longer, going round in circles until morning. That’s the
kind of mood 1 wanted to create.
GA: What’s especially convincing is the way you build the
discussions up, so that what begins as seemingly innocuous
gradually can become very pointed and quite nasty.
NBC: If you know someone well, that means you also
know their weaknesses, their vulnerable points. That’s
sometimes the tragedy of marriage. Normally you
never use that knowledge, but sometimes, if you feel it’s
necessary, you’ll use it.
GA: You’ve said before that you make a film partly for yourself,
as a way of dealing with things you’ve been thinking about.
NBC: Well, 1 don’t really make it for myself, but 1 do
draw on myself, and in looking at myself, 1 also try to
understand the nature of human relationships. 1 feel
there’s a darkness in life, and if 1 can face that realistically,
then 1 feel better in myself, in that life becomes more
understandable. More tolerable, perhaps. But you know
me: I’m a pessimistic person... ©
O Winter Sleep is released in UK cinemas on
21 November and is reviewed on page 93.
A Nuri Bilge Ceylan season runs at BFI
Southbank, London, until the end of November
If you know
someone well,
that means you
also know their
vulnerable points.
That’s the tragedy
of marriage.
Sometimes
you’ll use that
knowledge
TURKISH DELIGHTS
(Below, clockwise from top
left) Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s
Once Upon a Time In Anatolia
(2011), Climates (2006),
Three Monkeys (2008)
and Distant (2002)
34 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
THE FINAL SILENT
FILM BY G. W. PABST,
THE DIRECTOR OF
PANDORA*S BOX AND
THE THREEPENNY
OPERA STARRING
SILENT SCREEN SIREN
LOUISE BROOKS
DIARY
OF A
LOST
GIRL
www.mastersofcjnema.org
The
Masters o! Cinema
Series
AVAILABLE FROM
srsr.s£"™ amazon.co.uk‘
ON BLU-RAY & DYD
THIS NOYEMBER
TAKE ’EM TO MISSOURI
John Wayne as Thomas
Dunson and Montgomery
Clift as Matthew Garth - and
(right) Joanne Dru as Tess
Millay with Clift - in Howard
Hawks’s Red River
36 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
BFI NATIONAL ARCHIVE (i)/ KOBAL COLLECTION (i)
WATCHING
THE RIVER
FLOW
It’s impossible now to watch an old-fashioned western like Howard Hawks’s ‘Red River’ or ‘Rio
Bravo’ with the same epes we did in, say, the igyos or even the late 40s, but their influence on the
cultural landscape still colours the way we receive modem counterparts like ‘The Homesman’
By David Thomson
“I’ve taken the cattle to Abilene, time after time.” “You
saw nothing at Abilene.”
Was it always just a foolish male fantasy dressed up to
be smart? In which case where does that leave you when
you’re older than Groot was in Red River or Stumpy in Rio
Bravol Just to be clear, Walter Brennan was 54 when he
did Groot and 65 for Rio Bravo. Neither of those men was
retired, and neither am 1 . But 1 can’t help looking back
and wondering.
In 1976 , 1 wrote a piece for this magazine. All Along
the River’, which explored my feelings for Red River ovor
close to 30 years. As a child, 1 had loved the movie, its
story, its shift from boyhood to manhood, its black-and-
white West, and 1 had surely identified with Montgom-
ery Clift’s Matthew Garth. We are still shy talking about
what that ‘identification’ means, yet most of us, 1 think,
are drawn to movies because of it and are awkward spell-
ing it out. We want to be in the movie. 1 don’t mean we
want to be actors, but we take the movie and try it on
like a coat. By the late 70s, 1 was teaching Red River some-
times at Dartmouth, so 1 was identifying with Howard
Hawks more than with Clift. But 1 had a son and named
him Mathew. That son is 50 this year and doing better
than Clift.
Well, the river keeps moving. In 2012 , 1 was lucky
enough to teach a class on Hawks at Stanford. 1 say
‘lucky’ because a lot of the students were good and be-
cause to coincide with that season the quite incredible
David Packard mounted a complete season of Hawks
films at the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto, just down the
road from the campus. When 1 say complete, 1 mean all
the films, including The Ransom of Red Chief {ipdoct of the
1952 anthology film Full House) and Corvette K-2^^ (aka
The Nelson Touch). As 1 recall, only one of the movies was
not projected in 3 5mm. It was a show such as can hardly
come again. But how could 1 expect those students to see
Red River or the other films through the eyes of 1976, or
1948? How does one admit that Matthew Garth might by
now be older than Stumpy but far less sprightly and ap-
pealing? He could have such dementia that he no longer
recalls those days going towards Abilene. Yet there must
have been a day when Stumpy was a spiffy kid, without
a limp and with a knockout name (‘The lonesome kid’?),
but with prairie women hanging on his tall stories.
A Stanford course is ten weeks, so we did not have
enough time to examine all the films. Nor were many
of the kids appreciative of what the Stanford Theatre
was offering. They looked at a lot of the films on DVD
or YouTube. Not that this is a depressing story - if pro-
fessors feel gloomy, students don’t take it too seriously.
This group could not get enough of the comedies, and
it is a grand feeling to sit young people down and show
them things they have never seen before, or heard of -
Twentieth Century, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, To
Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, I Was a Male War Bride,
Monkey Business. We went back and forth with those
films to let the students catch up on the jokes, the lines,
the looks and the grace that were rushing by too fast for
them. They adored the nerve, the insolence, the farce
and the speed, and they were fascinated by the thought
that in His Girl Friday Walter Bums and Hildy Johnson
can’t really be in love properly unless she’s on the point
of marrying another man. They laughed and then told
themselves to hush in case they missed another wise-
crack. They saw that Susan in Baby was enticing
just because she was crazy and they rejoiced in a
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 37
WESTERNS
O blithe assumption that skeleton-gathering profes-
sors need to be educated.
Was that my deliberate mistake, listing the two Bog-
art-Bacah films among the comedies? 1 realise they are
often put under the category of ‘wartime drama’ and
‘hard-boiled detective mystery’, and 1 have nothing but
fond feelings for that Warner Brothers noir look, some
time before it caught on at RKO. It’s true, the one film
has a resistance and ugly police, and the other is murder
and bluff on those stunning Los Angeles sets. I’m not
forgetting the death of Harry Jones or the thought that
Steve and Slim are doing good by the Free French and
the refugee La Chesnaye. But 1 must tell you that my stu-
dents were in no doubt: those two films were comedies,
begging for things like Bacall in the hotel doorway and
the phone call to the police station. They wanted those
scenes to go on forever, and of course they have. When
Bacall died, they were her legend, and they still play. But
can we drop any thought of realism and tough decent
guys doing their job? These are movies about making
a movie and just trying to be a little different. They are
Howard Hawks keeping a straight face while bringing
his fantasies to life, finding his own fraud and turning it
into Matthew Garth’s lean panache.
It was exactly that educated love of humour and mas-
querade that made for dismay with Sergeant York, Air
Force, and even Red River doad Rio Bravo. Now, they were
on the edge with the latter: they could hear a version of
the Bogart-Bacall back-talk whenever Angie Dickinson’s
Feathers started screwballing John Wayne’s Chance in
Rio Bravo. They knew that the use of Ricky Nelson and
Dean Martin was droll inside show-business irony and
Howard attempting to be cool. They were patient with
the jailhouse sing-song. So why were they expected to
take Chance’s cockamamie besieged mentality so seri-
ously? Red Riverwas far tougher. Why the hell did Garth
and Dunson have to talk like figures from Eugene O’Neill
instead of Abbott and Costello? 1 did my best. 1 stood up
for the steadfast father-son rivalry, the very story 1 had
once applied to my own life. But 1 was lost when 1 had
to admit that my Garth, our Clift, had nearly collapsed
under the weight of that great hat and six-guns on his
slim hips. When 1 added that a wrangler named Richard
Farnsworth had taught Clift to stand up straight, chew
grass and approach a horse from the right end, they
knew what this movie should be: a Twentieth Century-like
comedy of grown men and artful pretenders trying to act
out an archaic dream. After all, they said, if this is seri-
ous father-son stuff, surely one of them had to die at the
end. Or both? Leaving Tess Millay (Joanne Dm) to nurse
Cherry Valance (John Ireland) back to health and robust
performance?
1 am writing this for Sight & Sound readers: so I’m
taking it on trust that you know who Cherry Valance,
Tess Millay and La Chesnaye were, and are. But maybe
I’m a chump to be sure of that. The river moves on, and
knowing a lot of obscure facts about old movies may
be an early sign of onset dementia, or having Stumpy-
ness in your head. Only the other day 1 read a piece in
the New Yorker, by Adam Gopnik, on the current atti-
tudes to Scott Fitzgerald. He took Fitzgerald’s line about
there being no second acts in America and he applied
it to several people, including Orson Welles, who went
downhill after two films. Well, maybe Adam Gopnik is
a dope - though 1 thought his essay was rather good - or
is he closer to being right than 1 care to hear? In other
words, after more than 50 years of Welles recovery, a lot
of books (none of them dull) and every chance to survey
the whole of Welles’s work (including many old holes in
the filmography), maybe that old theory of a burned-out
case has slunk back into orthodoxy.
HOW THE WEST WAS SPUN
One of the problems the Stanford kids had with Red River
and Rio Bravo was simply that they were not just west-
erns, but old-fashioned westerns - with Stetsons, horses,
.45s, whisky, generally meek women waiting to be no-
ticed and a thoroughly conservative attitude to ‘prog-
ress’. They agreed that neither Tess Millay nor Feathers
quite fit that bill, but that only sharpened their need for a
more modern approach. After all, they said, here we are
in the west of the United States where Stanford may be
the best school in the most intellectually active, devious
and formative part of the nation. The action is here! And
we’re as sharp and fast as Walter Bums, or we try to be.
Of course, the western genre has not gone away, but
it needs to benefit from a new historical awareness in
which the streets are filthy, the clothes are more varied
and where honour and a free market are under the pres-
sures we know today. Think of Steve Jobs as Wyatt Earp.
So Open Range was a lovely piece of nostalgia. Unforgiven
is a classic western now, and until Clint presses the old
angel of death switch at the very end it adheres to the
refreshing idea that courage is a myth for fools, while
killing is very nasty. Deadwoodwas a fair portrait of a real
shithole city in the West (at 4,500 feet, the muds are fit
to drown in). And we have had films, in modern dress,
that are natural developments of western themes. Think
of Badlands, The Right Stuff, The Parallax View, Chinatown
(where Noah Cross even wears a cowboy hat and has
water in his veins) - those are films about the way the
western states have altered the notion of what America
is and wants to be. The Social Networkis a new western in
which Harvard goes to Palo Alto, and where legal deposi-
tions have taken the place of battles (lawyers are our gun-
slingers). Melvin andHowardis the sweet romance of a no-
hoper meeting up with a lost god. Isn’t Casino gamblers
trying to be businesslike in a desert where you can bury
your opponents? There Will Be Blood, harsh and surreal
The problem with
‘The Homesman’
is that it shuts its
female characters
up in a box on
wheels and
effectivelp omits
them from the film
38 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
KOBAL COLLECTION (i)
as it may be, speaks to the narrow-minded pioneer spirit
that made and broke the West. Breaking Bad was a series
that kept returning to another bitter desert and lone op-
erators desperate to survive. And what is No Country for
Old Men but the latest version of The Wild Bunch, in which
outlawry has become regular business and a sheriff is left
not just to turn in his badge (the old gesture from High
Noon and Dirty Harry), but deliver the saddest elegy to
what has gone missing in the civilisation of exploitation?
Tommy Lee Jones delivers that speech and he is a land-
mark now in western eloquence and iconography. He
is himself from Texas, still lives there by choice, and is
one of the authentic hard faces in modern movies. His
The Three Burials ofMelquiades Estrada was a beautiful
amalgam of a Peckinpah mission with irony worthy of
Mark Twain, and it was a measured account of wretched
attitudes to Hispanics (Rio Bravo is failing that test now
- remember Carlos?). So 1 was more than ready for The
Homesman, his new film, adapted from a novel by Glen-
don Swarthout (who also wrote the original for TheShoot-
ist, that fond swansong for John Wayne).
1 like The Homesman (1 should admit that 1 am friendly
with its producer, Michael Fitzgerald), for its main story,
its respect for landscape, Jones’s unsentimental rascal
character, for the superb hotel passage and the wry
ending. But 1 have a problem with it, and 1 think it’s at
the heart of my quandary with Howard Hawks.
The job the homesman has to do is conduct three
young women who have gone mad back east to Iowa for
some sort of security and ease. The premise is that the ter-
rible hardships of life on the prairie (it’s Nebraska) have
made these women insane. They have had a hard time:
they’ve lost husbands and children, home and peace of
mind. But as people in the old West knew, you can’t have
everything. I’m sure some people lost their mind from
loneliness, untreated pain and the several kinds of sav-
agery that were on hand - much of it delivered by their
fellows and families. In fact, the history of the West shows
that women coped pretty well. They pulled the wagons
over mountains, they told bears to go shoo; they had
the children and cooked the meals and tried to sweep
the dust out of the houses; they agreed to be whores for
a while; some of them were kidnapped by Indians and
some of those found the Indians might be better compan-
ions than their husbands. I’m sure some women lost their
INTO THE WEST
Hilary Swank and Tommy
Lee Jones in The Homesman
(above); Deadwood, ‘a fair
portrait of a real shithole
city in the West’ (below);
and John Wayne as Sheriff
John T. Chance and Angie
Dickinson as Feathers in
Rio Bravo (below, left)
minds, but so did some men, and some of those wayward
geniuses got elected and became power-brokers.
What does ‘lost their minds’ mean? The disappoint-
ment in The Homesman is that it never examines the
women’s minds or wonders if talking to them might
help. Indeed, it shuts them up in a box on wheels and ef-
fectively omits them from the film. If it had been Hawks
in charge, then at least one of those women - it might
have been Grace Gummer - could have talked up a storm
and driven Jones’s character George Briggs to distraction
the way Feathers gets under John T. Chance’s skin.
But at the end of Rio Bravo, the feisty Feathers does then
fold her wings and give every hint of being ready to curl
up and do what Chance tells her, even if he’s her senior
by 24 years. That’s the complacent fantasist in Hawks, the
man who liked to cultivate independence in a woman so
long as she went quietly and obediently at the end of the
film. That’s part of what was always wrong, or worse, in
the western. That’s why Marge in Fargo and Mrs Miller
(with McCabe) are bold surprises who have lived long
enough to dispense with the risks in dreamy men. You
see, 1 wouldn’t mind a version of John Ford’s The Searchers
in which Debbie, the Natalie Wood character, says thanks
but no thanks to her self-satisfied Uncle Ethan. Perhaps
she rather likes her Comanche guy. Scar. Perhaps she has
children already, and maybe she is trying to erase the
memory of life in that cabin in the middle of the desert.
Truly, it’s no place to live. As it is, somehow Scar has got
her that pretty rose-coloured dress and found a beauty
parlour for her. Nobody can say Debbie has lost her mind.
I’m not blaming Hawks, or us, for liking him. He was
an expert filmmaker, and he did great comedies - The
Big Sleep is still one of the astonishing and indefinable
films to come out of Hollywood. But he was not at his
best whenever he turned solemn. He should have known
that, if he’s so funny and gentle with the stupid gravity of
Bruce in His Girl Friday. But the river moves on, as Renoir
found in India. Every day it looks fresh and beautiful. But
in 50 or 60 years it can change direction and wash over
the graves of all those who gazed at it. Old men recollect
(just about) but the river has no memory. ©
O The Homesman is released in UK cinemas on 21
November and is reviewed on page 60. Red River is
available on Blu-ray from Eureka/Masters of Cinema
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 39
Steve James’s ‘Life Itsef’ is an infectiously warm account of the career of the late Pulitzer prize-
winning USfilm critic Roger Ebert, charting his near go-year relationship with the ‘Chicago
Sun-Times’, his pioneering work on television and his enthusiastic late-life conversion to blogging
By Nick Bradshaw
I was not entirely surprised when Steve James failed to
pull out his camera and start filming me when we met
at this year’s Sheffield Doc/Fest. Making two consecutive
films about movie hacks might be a little heavy, and it
would be hard to improve on the current one, a testa-
ment to the life of America’s late popular heavyweight
Roger Ebert. Taking its cue (and title) from his memoirs.
Life Itself is a supremely elegant and infectiously warm
account of a man who both shaped and transcended
the movies, and a life that - pace what Ebert’s beloved
The Great Gatshy tells us about American lives - formed
three neat acts, professionally and personally One: the
swiftly naturalised Chicagoan, seemingly born to print,
who had an ease with both the word and the bottle, as
a number of lifelong muckers recount. Two, the popu-
larising TV pundit alongside fellow Chicagoan Gene
Siskel on a series of shows best remembered under the
moniker Siskel & Ebert, which splashed the pair’s thumbs
up/thumbs down verdicts across the TVs and billboards
of America; James has the outtakes, and the producers’
testimonies, to show that these two “radioactive” egos’
behind-the-scenes show was just as much of a ride. Three
constitutes Ebert’s latter-life uplift, even as cancer took
away his jaw and his voice, with his 1992 marriage to
trial attorney Chaz Hammelsmith and his turn to self-
publishing on the internet, where he found communion
with a global audience numbering in the high hundreds
of thousands.
Also in the mix are tributes from some of the filmmakers
XXXIir FESTIVAL IITERNATIONAL DU FILM
CANNES
Ebert supported and befriended, beyond James himself,
for whose Hoop Dreams (1994). Ebert banged the drum
hard. Werner Herzog hails this “soldier of cinema” and
“wounded comrade”. Martin Scorsese is very funny on
the pleasures and bewilderments of Russ Meyer’s Ebert-
scripted Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970). And there’s
Ebert himself, on camera, engaging with James and the
audience and laying down his last submissions to the
cinema; he finally succumbed to cancer in April 2013,
five months after James had begun working with him, so
the film’s interviewees waver between referring to him in
the present and the past. His words are beautifully read in
the movie by voice actor Stephen Stanton.
NB: It’s probably fair to say that Ebert meant more to Amer-
icans than to the rest of us, at least before that third act
brought him into direct orbit over the internet. We might
know him as the ‘two thumbs up’ guy, but can you tell us
what else he represented?
SJ: That’s where his international audience came from,
his third act. Something like half the people who fol-
lowed him on his website were international. Which is
pretty remarkable for someone who really was an Ameri-
can phenomenon and icon.
Being the first film critic to win the Pulitzer [in 1975]
was a feather in his cap, to be sure. He built his reputation
in the world of [written] film criticism, but in terms of the
broader reach, because he was in Chicago, 1 don’t think
he had it. The show really did it - that’s how 1 first heard
about him, how most people did. 1 remember my reac-
tion when 1 first tripped across it: first, “This is kind of
curious” and then, “Why Chicago critics?” 1 was studying
film at that point, and you never thought of Chicago as
any kind of place where film criticism of any great value
would emanate from. But when you go back and look at
the show, you realise what terrific television it was. They
managed to do something that is really hard, which is
talk about a film incisively in a short period of time and
create a real dialogue and debate. They were smart shows
- unless we’re all dumbed down, which is what [Time
magazine critic] Richard Corliss said it would do. Which
1 don’t agree with, but had to be in my film because it’s a
criticism that has been made.
JOLLY ROGER
Roger Ebert (right) showed
remarkable resilience
after being diagnosed
with cancer in 2002, never
losing his sense of humour
and continuing to attend
screenings even though he
found travelling to festivals
more difficult towards the
end of his life; Ebert’s press
card from the 1980 Cannes
Film Festival (below left)
40 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
PHOTOFESTNYC(i)
NB: Presumably in the shows’ dialogue there are nuances
that you don’t get in the thumbs system?
SJ: Absolutely. They came up with the thumbs up/
thumbs down as a final decision about whether to go
see a film or not, but yes, within the dialogue there were
far more nuances about what the film’s values were or
where it fell short. 1 talked to A.O. Scott about this, and
he said there’s a part of him that thinks to render a final
judgement is sort of an expectation of film criticism at
the level of a daily newspaper critic. Certainly not in
terms of the kind of ruminative criticism that would
go on in a journal like Sight & Sound, and maybe not as
definitive as thumbs up/thumbs down, which was a gim-
mick of sorts, but it was also like, “Okay, time to say.” Just
like if someone came up to you here at the film festival
and said, “Should 1 see it or not?” You could say, “Well,
you might want to and da da da...” “But yeah, should 1 see
it or not?” “Er, no, 1 don’t think you should.”
Anyway, the show raised the level of debate among
more common, everyday moviegoers. In the film they
talk about people coming in to the [Chicago] Sun-Times,
going over the music desk and being worshipful, [asking]
“What did you think?” And then they come over to Ebert
and go, “1 totally disagree with your review.” That’s the
thing about movies being the most democratic of art-
forms: everyone, no matter their level of understanding
and experience in watching films, thinks they know
what a good film and a bad film is. And that show encour-
aged people to say more than just “1 liked it” or “1 didn’t
like it”. It encouraged them to explain why, and debate it.
NB: And it’s not like there’s an established tradition of
quality film criticism on TV to follow.
SJ: No, they created the whole phenomenon, and did it
better than anybody else I’ve seen. And the thing that’s
amazing about Roger is that after they reinvented the
idea of film criticism for television, after he lost his voice,
he reinvented himself on the internet, and 1 believe he
did for internet criticism what he did for television criti-
cism. He wasn’t the first, but he was the most prominent
who embraced it early, and made it more legit. Up until
Roger really got serious about criticism and blog-
ging on the net - and before paid j ournalists were
The thing that’s
amazing about
Roger is that after
he reinvented
the idea of film
criticismfor
television, after he
lost his voice, he
reinvented himself
on the internet
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 41
STEVE JAMES
LIFE ITSELF
© losing all their jobs in the States - that was where
you’d go to write if you didn’t have a job: no one
will pay you, so put your opinion on the internet.
NB: Which ironically was a space also embraced by his
sometime Chicago adversary Jonathan Rosenbaum, who
has clearly been delighted by its possibilities.
SJ: Yeah! Rosenbaum said for himself, the internet is
where it happens for him; it’s his livelihood and reach.
NB: I felt the way you sequenced Rosenbaum’s arguments
about the TV show shutting out smaller movies suggested
you don’t really buy his claim.
SJ: His point is both true and not entirely true. 1 wasn’t
just putting him in there to be refuted; he’s right that the
show reviewed a lot of Hollywood movies, and Roger did
Oscar broadcasts from the red carpet. They were part of
that industry, without question.
But you don’t have to look too far to find dozens of
filmmakers who say, “Without that show embracing
my film, it would have disappeared without a trace.” 1
could have interviewed many more... And when you go
back and look at what was being reviewed: it’s amazing,
actually. In any given week there might have been three,
five Hollywood movies, but there were a lot of weeks
where there are two Hollywood movies and a Fassbind-
er, a Schlondorff, an indie American film or a documen-
tary. Hollywood absolutely used them, ‘two thumbs up’
became a huge deal, but they didn’t allow themselves to
be fully co-opted. But Rosenbaum’s a brilliant guy and 1
was so glad he was candid in the film, because he does
represent a point of view about what Siskel and Ebert
were doing to film criticism.
NB: It encapsulates an ongoing debate concerning which
movies should be talked about that’s partly a legitimate
question of principle and partly pure catty ideology.
SJ: Yes, there was an element of jealousy of their power
among some of the critics who felt more knowledgeable
or scholarly or, “Why not me?”
NB: It’s an amazing point to be making a film, on that cusp
of present and past tense. You’ve got the present-tense
documentary of Ebert as well as a history piece.
SJ: Creatively it was an exciting, fun film to put together.
Going back and forth between the present and past: 1
very much enjoyed that part of the process.
But 1 didn’t, when we started, expect that he was going
to be gone. And the stuff in the present was going to be
about how resilient he has been and continues to be; how
he carries on despite all he’s been through, and goes to
screenings, has parties... He wasn’t travelling as much to
festivals those last couple of years, but 1 was determined
to show he’s trying not to miss a step if he can, despite all
this. We weren’t able to show that, but 1 think the deeper
thing was there, which is he’s still Roger, he’s still got the
sense of humour, he’s still working, doing what he does,
despite even more adversity. Which in a way just made
it more poignant.
NB: His eyes, in the hospital scenes, are so expressive and
vivacious.
SJ: There’s that quote 1 put at the beginning about how
he sees his life as a movie: he doesn’t know how he got
in it, but he’s trying to enjoy it. Not in a facile way, but
1 think he enjoyed the ride, just like in a good movie.
He had his dark moments and tough times, but always
seemed to embrace whatever it was, on some level. In-
cluding the end. He says to Chaz, “I’ve had a great life, and
death is a part of life.” It’s a pretty remarkable thing to say
when facing it right there: we should all be so happy with
our lives, and brave to face [our end].
NB: Also very moving is his note about it being his film
as well as yours - and he gets you to show yourself in the
mirror, like the Maysles in Grey Gardens. Was he a big aficio-
nado of documentaries too? He supported Hoop Dreams,
of course...
SJ: He supported many docs; he loved documentary.
They did a lot of docs on the show - starting with Errol
Morris. Gates of Heaven [1978] was the first documentary
they reviewed, but from then they did them consistently.
Famously, they saved [Louis Malle’s doc-ish 1981 film]
Mp Dinner with Andre from obscurity: they just pounded
the drum for that film. Other critics played a role, but
reviewing it on their show got it out there - in the pre-
internet age, nobody’s reading the New York Times online.
Even my work: when The Interrupters premiered at
Sundance [in 201 1], we’d sent him a screener, but 1 didn’t
hear anything from him until he tweeted on the opening
night: “Oscar-worthy”... He knew exactly what he was
doing, and the right time to do it. And he was outraged
when we didn’t get shortlisted, and wrote about it, like
he had done with Hoop Dreams, if not on the same scale,
because then there’d been more... outrage. But he contin-
ued to be very supportive of my work over the years.
1 wouldn’t have done the film just for that, though, nor
just because he was an important critic 1 admired. 1 don’t
know that that would have been appealing enough to
me. It wasn’t until 1 read the memoir and saw what an
incredible life journey he’d had that 1 really wanted to do
the film. It’s the most poetic and thoughtful prose that
he’s written. He really did just start to take account of his
life in those last few years, and with the memoir really
did it. As soon as he gets to Chicago, at any rate, it just
takes off. It’s a great read. ©
© Life Itself is released on 14 November
and is reviewed on page 78
In the film Roger
sa\;s to his wife,
Tve had a great
life, and death is a
part of life.’ It’s a
pretty remarkable
thing to sap
when facing it
right there
CRITICAL MASS
Roger Ebert helped pioneer
film criticism on television
with Gene Siskel in Sneak
Previews (above) and later
in Siskel & Ebert and other
early incarnations of At the
Movies. Ebert continued as
a host on the show after
Siskel’s death in 1999,
initially with a series of
guest critics and later
with Richard Roeper
42 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
The World Film Locations series explores and reveals the relationship between the
city and cinema by using a predominantly visual approach perfectly suited to the
medium of film. The city continues to play a central role in a multitude of films,
helping us to frame our understanding of place and of the world around us. Whether
as elaborate directorial love letters or as time specific cultural settings, the city acts as
a vital character in helping to tell a story.
World Film Locations: Boston
Edited by Marcelline Block
ISBN 9781783201983
Paperback 128 pages
Price £15.50
Published April 2014
World Film Locations; Shanghai
Edited by John Berra and Wei Ju
ISBN 9781783201990
Paperback 128 pages
Price £15.50
Published April 2014
World Film Locations: San Francisco
Edited by Scott Jordan Harris
ISBN 9781783201136
Paperback 132 pages
Price £15.50
Published July 2013
World Film Locations; Havana
Edited by Ann Marie Stock
ISBN 9781783201976
Paperback 128 pages
Price £15.50
Published April 2014
World Film Locations; Hong Kong
Edited by Linda Chiu-Han Lai
and Kimburley Wing-Yee Choi
ISBN 9781783200214
Paperback 116 pages
Price £15.50
Published July 2013
World Film Locations; Rome
Edited by Gabriel Solomons
ISBN 9781783202003
Paperback 128 pages
Price £15.50
Published May 2014
‘Stations of the Cross’, Dietrich Bruggemann’s
exploration of a teenage girl’s growing religious
fanaticism, is the latest in a string of films
exploring Christianity and its adherents - a
trend that hints at a wider cultural and spiritual
disquiet at the heart of the contemporary world
By Catherine Wheatley
HOLY
MOTORS
In Christian art, the Stations of the Cross are a series of
images depicting Jesus’s journey to his crucifixion at
Calvary. Starting with Christ’s sentencing and ending
with his burial, there are usually 14 stations, of which
anywhere between seven and 14 might be rendered as
paintings or sculptures. They hang in churches and ca-
thedrals, serving as a reminder of the sacrifice that Christ
made for the sake of man, intended to inspire contem-
plation, gratitude and remorse. An early form of serialisa-
tion, they are in a sense proto-cinematic.
Screenwriter Anna Briiggemann and her director
brother Dietrich, who also had a hand in the script, hew
closely to both the spirit and style of these artworks
for their Stations of the Cross, which follows teenage
protagonist Maria (Lea van Acken), a member of the
fictional Society of St. Paul, as she becomes increasingly
extreme in her devotion to Jesus. The film is divided
into 14 self-contained chapters, each representing a
different station and filmed in a continuous deep-focus
long take. With three key exceptions, the camera never
moves. The direction is sparse to the point of austerity,
the performances pared back. Opening with a 1 5-minute
theological discussion between a priest and the younger
members of his congregation, this is a film that takes
Christianity seriously and asks its audience to do likewise.
In present-day Europe, that’s something of a bold
move. The developed West more or less did away
with God some time ago, and the Church is no longer
something we particularly concern ourselves with.
As Terry Eagleton points out in Culture and
the Death of God, traditional churchgoing is in
RESTLESS SPIRITS
Father Weber (Florian
Stetter) in discussion with*.
Maria (Lea van Acken), a
young woman who becomes
increasingly obsessive in ^
her devotfoiTTo Jesus in^*^
Dietrich Bruggemann’s
The Stations of the Cross
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 45
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
© perpetual decline, while the strident scepticism of
Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens has
struck a chord with the book-buying classes. At worst
Christianity is seen as reactionary, at best softheaded
and out of date. For most of us, it’s an eccentricity or a
bad habit, something that politicians and the royal
family pay lip service to at Christmas. As an impassioned
Father Weber (Florian Stetter) explains to his army of
child soldiers in the opening scene of Stations of the Cross,
their church needs warriors right now precisely because
there are so few left.
And yet Stations isn’t quite the curiosity piece that
it might first appear. Over the last decade a slow but
regular supply of European films have cast a cool gaze
upon Christianity and its adherents. The starting point
was arguably Philip Groning’s Into Great Silence (200s), a
169-minute meditation on the sequestered inhabitants
of a Carthusian monastery. The following year Saverio
Costanzo’s study of a handsome young postulant set
almost entirely in a Venetian seminary. In Memory of Me
(2006), saw some festival success. A pause, and then in
2009 a boon year, with Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes, Bruno
Dumont’s Hadewijch, and Eugene Green’s The Portuguese
Nun all examining a particularly female experience
of faith. Soon afterwards came Xavier Beauvois’s Of
Gods and Men (2010), Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope
(Habemus Papam, 2011) and Alice Rohrwacher’s Corpo
Celeste (201 1). The list continues. This year Stations of the
Cmss joins John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary and Pawel
Pawlikowski’s Ida among the films explicitly concerned
with the trials and tribulations of the latter-day Church.
IN GOD WE TRUST
To a certain extent, these works are continuations of a
longstanding tradition in European Cinema; after all,
as Andre Bazin had it, “The cinema has always been
interested in God.” But despite McDonagh’s claims that
his film is inspired by the transcendental phenomenology
and the spiritual style of Robert Bresson, these are not,
on the whole, works that strive for the sublime. Instead,
this is a cinema concerned with the dirty, dusty form
of Christianity as it is practised by men and women: its
observances and rituals, its ornaments and doctrines.
It is a cinema inhabited by priests, monks and even
the Pope himself, littered with Annas, Marias, Anna-
Marias, Marthas, Christines and Bernadettes. Its action
turns around convents and cloisters, local churches
and Lourdes. Its soundtrack is the hushed rumble of
whispered vespers. There are miracles to be found too
within these strange, often severe films. In Stations of the
Cross, a mute child speaks; in Lourdes, a paraplegic walks.
Dumont’s Hors Satan (2011) sees the dead raised.
The directors of these films cleave to the great works
of Christian art. The first, impressive scene of Stations of
the Cmss bears a striking resemblance to da Vinci’s The
Last Supper (i4g4-gSy, the second to Raphael’s Madonna
of the Meadow (i 505). Maria on her deathbed is Bellini’s
Imago pietatis (014^7): eyes downcast, wrists crossed.
Many critics noted the influence of Vermeer on Ida, but
a perceptive few spotted the similarities of certain shots
to Renaissance Madonnas. Pawlikowski draws visual
parallels too, between his young heroine and the smooth,
cold marble statues of Christ that fill the convent where
she grew up. Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors {1^7,7,) -
which offers an allegory of religious divisions in 16th-
century England - has a significant place in Calvary.
Foregrounding the art-historical traditions in which
they stand, these works make explicit the twin legacies of
protestant asceticism and Catholic adornment that wind
their way through whole swathes of European cinema.
The austere style of Michael Haneke, meanwhile, has
much in common with the puritanical Protestantism
that he so rigorously critiqued in The White Ribbon (2009).
In films more and less concerned with Christianity,
Ulrich Seidl (who had ambitions to join the priesthood
before becoming a filmmaker) captures his subjects
in front-on, symmetrical tableaux that recall Catholic
altarpieces. His subject matter comes straight from
Hieronymus Bosch. Catherine Breillat’s cinematic
universe is heavy with Catholic symbolism, nowhere
more so than in Bluebeard (2009), whose narrative is
described by the director as “a version of the Eall”, and
which departs startlingly from all the source material
with a convent-set prologue.
BRIDES OF CHRIST
Catholic imagery is rife too in the films of Bruno Dumont,
as are recurring Christ figures, from the epileptic anti-
hero of La Vie de Jesus (1997) through the inscrutable
detective of LHumanite (iggg) to the impassive soldier
of Flanders (2006). Celine, the overzealous novitiate of
Hadewijch - in which Catholicism takes centre stage
- is a variant on the theme, but she also sits alongside
Ida’s Anna and Stations of the Cross’s Maria as a particular
type common to these films. Inhabiting a liminal space
between girlhood and adulthood, these young women -
whey-faced, woeful, almost androgynous - channel their
burgeoning sexuality into becoming ‘brides of Christ’.
Their piety is thus imbued with a subliminal eroticism,
a notion taken to an extreme by Seidl in Paradise: Faith,
in which a woman masturbates with a crucifix, and by
Jean-Claude Brisseau’s series of soft-pom quasi-religious
odysseys. A genre unto themselves, Brisseau’s films
are full of nubile young nuns who take the notion of
spiritual ecstasy that step too far.
Like Anna, Celine is cast out of the safe confines of
her convent into secular society in order to better learn
what is at stake in becoming a bride of Jesus. Like Maria,
her devotion takes her to the limits of the endurable. For
all three young women, Christianity is bound up with
violence, as it also is for Marta, the younger heroine of
Corpo Celeste, a child who, for the film’s final third, must
literally shoulder her cross. These desperate girls find
their mirror images in the ageing clergymen suffering
In the aftermath
of political
disappointment,
when democracy
and capitalism,
the Gods of civil
religion, have
deserted us, there
is potential solace
in a return to their
predecessors
46 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
crises of faith who similarly proliferate throughout these
films. The sorrows of Brendan Gleeson’s ‘good priest’ in
Calvary and Michel Piccoli’s Supreme Pontiff in We
Have a Pope alike resound in the plaintive cry of Olivier
Rabourdin’s besieged brother Christophe in Of Gods
and Men: “0 Lord, please do not forsake me.” Staggering
beneath the burdens that their callings have placed
upon them, shell-shocked by the confrontation with
secularism, these men duck and reel like ageing fighters,
the cares of the world carved upon their craggy faces. As
the old patriarchal, paternalistic church crumbles, its girl
children are left insecure and disorientated, clinging to a
creed out of fear rather than faith.
NOSTALGIA FOR THE SACRED
Grown men undergoing crises of identity; adolescent
girls casting desperately about for some way to channel
their turbulent emotions: these are archetypes as old as
cinema itself. And there is, of course, nothing specifically
religious about them. We might just as well be describing
Gone Girl's newly redundant Nick Dunne, or the winsome
teens of The Bling Ring. Indeed the anxieties those films
speak to - about big business, consumer culture and
economic collapse - might be more pertinent to modem
audiences. Who worries now that our children will
become fundamentalist Catholics? We are rather more
concerned, aren’t we, about the dangers of the internet,
the unbalanced influence of the one per cent?
Perhaps though it is precisely the fear of, as Maria
puts it in Stations, “a world of TV and Facebook and
people who’ve sold their souls to be dead in the middle
of life” that underpin this filmic return to older forms of
religion. In the aftermath of political disappointment,
when democracy and capitalism, the Gods of civil
religion, have deserted us, there is potential solace in
a return to their predecessors. In the press notes for
Stations of the Gross, Anna Bruggemann describes “a
very strong yearning for unshakable values and simple
truths” among her peers. Her brother Dietrich agrees:
“Our own lives are so splintered, we’re swimming in a
sea of meaningless actionism - it is only one little step
before we start dreaming ourselves away to a monastery,
watching films in which the silent practice of one’s faith
is interpreted favourably.”
Viewed in this light, slow cinema itself seems to
stand for a spiritual retreat of sorts. We are nostalgic
for the sacred so we collect examples of cinematic
seriousness and call it spirituality. It’s telling in this
regard that Hadewijch’s Celine hails from an affluent
family; that Galvanfs Father James has swapped a life of
grief and alcoholism in London for one of sobriety and
sequestration in Sligo; that Idds Anna turns her back on
an inherited apartment full of chic dresses and whisky
bottles and on a handsome jazz-musician suitor, the polo-
necked epitome of modernisation. These beleaguered
souls hark back to a romantic sensibility that equates
the meaningful with suffering, turbulence, passion - the
very paradigm of the Cross.
It should be said, though, that these films are not
/tjr Christianity; they have little relation to the recent
slew of faith-based movies snaking through America’s
heartland, or the big-budget biblical epics - the likes
of Darren Aronofsky’s Noah and Ridley Scott’s
Exodus: Gods and Kings - that followed Mel
THE NEW SEEKERS
Maria demands that the
music in her gym class is
switched off on the grounds
that it is the work of the
devil, in Stations of the Cross
(above opposite); and (from
top) Alice Rohrwacher’s
Corpo Celeste, Bruno
Dumont’s Hadewijch and
Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 47
STATIONS OF THE CROSS
© Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). They
certainly aren’t theological treatises. Nor are they
against Christianity Arguably, they don’t need to be. The
previous generation of provocateurs - Buhuel, Pasolini,
Rivette - took blasphemy and anticlericalism as far as
it needed to go, and modern audiences hardly bat an
eyelid at Seidl’s debauched iconoclasm. Instead, works
such as Stations of the Cross and Ida are characterised
by ambivalence and ambiguity, poised precariously
between credence and scepticism. They speak to a
yearning for belief, rather than belief itself. God himself
is absent. Time and again these characters call out to him,
but they receive little by way of reply.
EXOTIC FUNDAMENTALISM
What did we lose when we committed deicide? Did
we even do the deed? Terry Eagleton wryly concludes
that “the Almighty has proved remarkably difficult to
dispose of”, while Dietrich Briiggemann cites the global
resurgence of radical practitioners of faith as inspiration
for Stations of the Cross. “While in the late 20th century we
were still able to believe that religion had more or less
become irrelevant,” he states, “today we see the opposite
everywhere: the spread of evangelical Christians in
America, the permanent media presence of militant
Islam.” Perhaps because, as the dictum has it, it’s easier
to write about what you know. Stations of the Cross
imagines a local manifestation of this phenomenon
(and it’s worth noting in this respect that the Society of
St. Paul was inspired by the real-life Society of St. Pius X,
notorious for its rejection of all the semi-liberal reforms
adopted by the Vatican since the late 60s). In this regard,
the film’s success is debatable. While Stations of the Cross
offers a compelling portrait of fundamentalism and the
damage it can wreak on impressionable young minds, in
the European context it smacks of anachronism, if not
absurdity. The catalogue of sins, temptations and traps
that Maria might fall into is faintly risible (“Soul and
gospel music!” Maria’s mother wails, aghast).
There is certainly an exotic fascination, though,
to seeing a European Christian equivalent to the
fundamentalism that we associate today with other
places, other religions. The film itself reflects cleverly
on our coyness about home-grown fanaticism in a gym-
class argument between Maria, her classmates and her
teacher: while her Islamic peers are allowed to miss the
class on the grounds of ‘tolerance’, Maria’s insistence that
the Roxette track they’re skipping to be switched off on
the grounds that it’s “the devil’s music” is met with jeers
and insults.
Other filmmakers have drawn more direct
comparisons, pairing up their Christian protagonists
with Islamic counterparts. Hadewijch’s Celine enters
a friendship with extremist Nassir that takes her to
Palestine; while the marriage of evangelist Anna Maria to
Nabil in Paradise: Faith ends in brutal confrontation, and
the mutual respect between the monks and mujahidin
insurgents in Of Gods and Men leads to death. Implicit
in these narratives of mutual destruction is both a
confrontation and conflation of two different forms of
fundamentalism. It is surely no coincidence that these
studies of Christian zeal arose in the years following 9/1 1.
We are not so different, these films tell us, and at the same
time they ask us, “What would we be willing to die for?”
KEEPING THE FAITH
Critics have worked hard to downplay the Christian
elements of these films. They tease the political aspects
out of Of Gods and Men, read it in the context of post-
colonialism and military imperialism. They argue that
We Have a Pope is a social satire, Ida is a meditation on
Polish history. Calvary a reflection on Ireland’s economic
collapse.
They are these things, undoubtedly. But they are
also, crucially, reflections of Christianity’s place as part
of our cultural and historical heritage. In conversation
with Livia Bloom for Ez 7 mma/:er magazine Pawlikowski
describes the central questions that motivate Ida as
having to do with how we understand the contemporary
place of religion. “What does it mean to be Christian?”
he asks. “Can you be a good Christian without being
Polish Catholic? Is religion a tribal demarcation or is it
something spiritual within you? What defines identity?
The blood that you have? The faith you grew up with or
your self-understanding?”
His words echo those of Susan Sontag, who in her
1964 essay ‘Piety without content’ took on the notion
of amorphous religiosity without faith or observance,
coming to the stern conclusion that one cannot be
religious in general any more than one can speak
language in general. “To be religious,” she writes, “is
always to be in some sense an adherent to a specific
symbolism and a specific historic community, whatever
the interpretation of these symbols and this historic
community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved
in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to
the philosophic assertions that a being whom we may
call God exists, that life has meaning. Religion is not
equivalent to the theistic proposition.”
To write of ‘spiritual style’ without acknowledging
of what that spirituality consists, from whence it is
born, is misguided. God may be dead, and European
religion may have passed away with him. But whatever
their motivations, the likes of Stations of the Cross bear
witness to the ways in which Christianity - its forms,
its aesthetics, its ways of thinking and feeling - are
constitutive of our collective subconscious. The value
of suffering and guilt, the cult of love, the shock of
materialism: these come to us from Christianity, they
are in our blood, our bones. And just as Ida’s buried
skeletons inevitably will surface, so our religious past
returns to haunt us. To paraphrase Calvary’s Eather
James, Christianity’s time will never be gone. ©
© Stations of the Cross is released in UK cinemas
on 28 November and is reviewed on page 90
Works such as
‘Stations of the
Cross’ and ‘Ida’
are characterised
by ambiguity.
They speak to
a yearning for
belief, rather than
belief itself God
himself is absent
CATHOLIC TASTES
Calvary (above), which
centres on a week in the life
of ‘good priest’ Father James
(Brendan Gleeson) after he
has been marked for death
by a vengeful parishioner, is
one of a number of recent
films concerned with the
trials and tribulations of
the latter-day Church
48 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
BOYS
Journal of Film Preservation
91
Journal of Film
10.2014
Preservation
\
The Journal of Film Preservation is published by the
International Federation of Film Archives (FIAF) twice a
year. It offers a forum for both general and specialized
discussions on all theoretical, technical and historical
aspects of moving image archival activities. Articles are
written in English, French or Spanish, with summaries in
the other two languages.
IN THE CURRENT ISSUE
OPEN FORUM Suggested Template for a Collection Policy |
Jan Svankmajer | The Birth of the Tramp Conference |
Indian Cinema - A Vanishing Legacy | The Digital Projection
of Archival Films Project - Phase One | Obituaries of Hoos
Blotkomp, Manuel Martinez Corril, Peter von Bagh & Mary
Leo Bandy • HISTORY Raymond Borde et Henri Longlois,
1957-1965 I The Founding of the Osterreichisches Filmmu-
seum and Its Admission to FIAF | El desorrollo del cine de
animacion en Brasil y lo creocion del Centro Tecnico Audio-
visual I Reproducing the Original Colour Appearance of
Gasparcolor • ARCHIVES AT WORK The Special Collections
of the BFI National Archive | "Lost" Films Return Home -
Successful Cases of Repatriation | Inauguration de la Fon-
dation Jerome Seydoux-Pathe d Paris • BOOKS & DVDs
PURCHASE THE CURRENT ISSUE, DOWNLOAD BACK ISSUES OR SUBSCRIBE TO THE JFP AT www.fiafnet.org
fiaf
Wide Angle
EXPLORING THE BIGGER PICTURE
PREVIEW
THE REBORN IDENTITY
Omer Fast is the latest artist to
move into feature filmmaking,
with an adaptation of Tom
McCarthy’s cult novel Remainder
By Kieron Corless
In Tom McCarthy’s savagely brilliant novel
Remainder (200’^), the unnamed narrator,
recovering from horrific injuries sustained when
something (“Technology Parts, bits”) fell on him
out of the sky, heads to his local cinema, the
Brixton Ritzy, to watch Mean Streets. He’s troubled
by Robert De Niro’s authentic mode of being, his
unselfconscious movements, measured against
which his own seem fake. “Even before the
accident, if Pd been walking down the street just
like De Niro, smoking a cigarette just like him,
and even if it had lit first try, Pd still be thinking:
Here I am, walking down the street, smoking a
cigarette, like someone in a film See? Second-hand.”
Ironically enough, he too will now be in a film,
an adaptation of McCarthy’s novel by artist Omer
Fast, shot in London and Germany earlier this
year and slated for release in 201 5, in which Tom
Sturridge plays the still unnamed protagonist.
His obsessive attempts after his accident to
overcome trauma and memory loss, to reconnect
with himself and the world, involve staging a
series of re-enactments of isolated remembered
moments, often quite banal, that occasionally rise
to the surface and haunt him, the large financial
settlement he receives facilitating their spiralling
elaborateness and strangeness. In interviews
on the book’s publication, McCarthy spoke of
cinema infiltrating the novel, and perhaps it’s not
a stretch to align those re-enactments with the
work of a film director, albeit minus the cameras.
Ever since the film was announced, there’s
been considerable ‘noise’ around it; a cult novel
and novelist teamed with a contemporary artist
of considerable international repute. When I visit
the production for an outdoor scene early in the
film, shot on the south bank of the Thames near
Westminster Bridge, Fast turns out to be relaxed
company, affable and self-deprecating, but every
now and then in our conversation he throws
in comments that suggest a degree of hesitancy
and struggle. He tells me about a newspaper
cartoon he once saw, of two sheep chewing rolls
of film. One says to the other: “I thought the book
was better.” It’s a difficult balancing act; staying
true to the novel but making something that
stands up on its own, that isn’t second-hand.
It transpires that McCarthy greatly admires
Fast’s work and suggested him for the project.
Did he write the script? “No, he’s way too smart
and too independent to get himself mixed up
in something this dirty and ruinous,” jokes Fast.
“He’s always thought that the novel and the script
should remain apart.” He happily participated
in a three-day brainstorm, though, which Fast
then fed into his own script. It’s intriguing just
how much of a fit, almost uncannily so. Fast’s
Fasfs work as an artist is almost
uncannily attuned to McCarthy’s
novel, equally preoccupied with
ideas of trauma and re-enactment
50 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
own work is with McCarthy’s vision in the book,
his artistic practice much preoccupied with
exploring ideas around trauma and re-enactment.
The last Fast film I saw was the eerily beautiful
and unsettling 5,000 Feet Is the Best, at London’s
Imperial War Museum last year, about drone
operators and their victims - more nasty stuff
falling out of the sky The film’s disorienting,
mesmerising repetitions-with-variations
slowly, stealthily seemed to undermine what
we understand as ‘real’. A profound Lynchian
unease pervaded the whole. I couldn’t get it
out of my head for weeks after seeing it.
We fall to discussing Fast’s work in general.
“A lot of it deals with the vacuum that’s created
after someone has been through a traumatic
event, and the way that people try to reconnect
to themselves, family, friends, society, their lives,
memories in this case, when there’s been such a
rupture and disruption. I see that disruption as a
wonderful moment in a sense, as a reawakening,
possibly a creative moment, as indeed it is for
this character.” The protagonist is still a long
way away from anything wonderful in the scene
being shot. It’s a wet, freezing May evening by
the river, feeling more like November, and that
sense of disjunction hovers over proceedings.
Sturridge is sitting on a bench next to St Thomas’s
hospital, his character being gently spoon-
fed ‘wise’ advice by a honey-toned doctor.
“I’ve tried very hard to go for a minimal palette
as far as the character’s expressive performance
is concerned, how much he emotes and how
much he’s allowed to show,” Fast explains. “He’s
been through an accident, he has a disability,
a traumatic brain injury. He is literally a bit of
a shell. We’re dealing with someone who, on
first appearance, might seem to be quite OK,
quite normal, but on closer inspection he’s
probably not. It’s a very delicate thing to do.”
This description is borne out by Sturridge’s
performance. I watch a couple of takes huddled
round a tiny monitor with the rest of the small
crew. It’s only on the second take that I begin to
register the subtleties, the hesitancy, the not-quite-
thereness of it. There’s a sudden tug of sadness too.
There’s been something of a stampede from
the art world into narrative filmmaking in the
last few years, which no doubt entails some
rethinking of working practices. How did Fast find
the development process, replete with phrases
like ‘character’s journey’, ‘backstory’, ‘empathy’
and ‘identification’? “I’m not used to it, and it often
felt to me like group therapy, where you sit in
a room and you say, ‘Hi, my name is Omer Fast,
and I’m really really really fucking this up. Will
you please help me?”’ I’m used to getting smaller
sums of money from people who really couldn’t
care less about what I do, and the freedom
that involves is wonderful. Those projects are
immeasurably free and irresponsible. This process
is entirely different. You’re sitting in a room with
several people who’ve read the book, are all keen
on seeing a successful adaptation of it, and yet
what that means yzs-a-yzsthe actual substance
might at some points diverge - indeed, does
diverge. I had some hard lessons to learn, which
did involve ‘sympathy’ for the protagonist, and
addressing how much of his disconnectedness
and freakishness we can preserve.” Nevertheless,
‘This is not for the fainthearted’: Omer Fast
the changes Fast has made in the transition
from book to screen, which he describes as
“a perversion of the novel”, are radical and
ingenious; led more by images, as you’d expect,
which in turn prompted a complete rethink of
the book’s linear structure. And the notion of
replicating the book’s first-person viewpoint
through a voiceover was summarily rejected.
But at the heart of the novel, the philosophical
and conceptual substance of the matter, sits the
notion of re-enactment, central to Fast’s own
art work too. Why has he been so repeatedly
drawn to it? “Re-enactment allows for two things
to happen: to delve into our understanding of
the past, and make the past something which is
more performative,” he explains. “On the other
hand, there’s this weird aesthetic that happens
if you introduce this notion of repetition into a
narrative. You allow an audience to see something
more than once. There’s something very musical
about that... It can introduce a theme, and a
variation in the changes that occur as something
is repeated, so you’re beginning to create layers
and a tension. You can begin to create a history
within the story. It opens up two interesting
perspectives: one is psychological, and possibly
social and historical; and of course the other
one is, depending on the subject, very formal
and much more related to the aesthetics of the
story. If you’re going to film something over and
over again, and vary the angle, you’re inevitably
getting into aesthetic decisions that could give
an aesthetic charge or pleasure, that may or
may not jibe with the subject you’ve chosen.”
Formal matters aside, did Fast experience
an emotional response to the novel? After all,
we’re talking about one of the strangest, most
alienated and disembodied characters in recent
fiction; someone fascinating, but hard to get a
fix on. “I thought what was really nice at the end
of the book, and which I’m trying to preserve -
albeit doing something more radical with the
narrative structure and the temporality of the
story - is this notion of grace. I’m not a religious
person and it’s difficult for me to get into that
without being immediately critical, but I felt
that what was emotional in the book was more
about the obsessive efforts the protagonist
undergoes to realise something, and not just
something about himself but to actually create
something, and this is very close to anyone who
is working in a creative career or process; but
also the notion of grace, the really, really narrow
space that’s opened up at the end of the book,
and I think the film too, for that, for this pause,
this deliverance; the slight opening up of the
landscape in front of someone after all that work.’
Fast is called over to deal with something in
the scene and I prepare to head off somewhere
warm. Before I go, I have to ask: would he do this
again. “Not any time soon,” he admits ruefully.
“This is not for the fainthearted. I don’t think
I’m the right type for this kind of work. I like my
short projects. I have a ton of freedom in them
and they’re not as painful. But this is a challenge,
and it’s quite a wonderful chance to see a 1 00-
page script and a more elaborately articulated
world come together via this giant collaborative
enterprise. It’s a huge privilege to do something
like this, and it all really starts with Tom just
trusting me. But it’s also fucking confusing.” ©
O Remainder m\\ be released in
UK cinemas in autumn 2015
I’m not there: the strangeness of the main character proved a challenge in terms of fostering empathy
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 51
WIDE ANGLE
SILENT HOPE
At the edge of the audible: Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard composed the electroacoustic soundtrack
In 40 Days of Silence, an Uzbek girl’s
vow not to speak is underwritten
by a bold experimental score that
eschews tradition and nature
By Frances Moi^n
What do you hear when your own voice is
quieted? In the recent Uzbek film 40 Days of
Silence, Bibicha, a young girl in a remote mountain
village, forges her adult self - you could say she
finds her voice - by vowing not to speak for 40
days, a practice known in Central Asia as chilla.
The search for wisdom through retreat and
meditation spans millennia, from shamanic
rituals to self-improvement programmes that
promise a respite from daily anxieties. Saodat
Ismailova’s haunting film balances the historical
weight of this ancient undertaking with the
tensions of doing it in the present day in a
community in which tradition is both a solace
and a bind, especially for its women and girls.
Ismailova has also made a film about listening.
Bibicha (Rushana Sadikova) moves through
the 40-day silence acutely aware of the sounds
around her. Her chilla is not a luxurious retreat
‘experience’ as it might be for Western secular
seekers of enlightenment - she barely has her
own room at her grandmother’s house, where
she has chosen to take her vow. Her aunt has
reluctantly come home from the city where she
would much rather be, and the tinny melodies
of her text message alerts and romantic pop
songs interrupt the long nights; off-camera,
Bibicha’s mother argues with the grandmother
about Bibicha’s choice, fearing for her sanity,
while her daughter eavesdrops. Small sounds -
breath, eating, rain, the distant noise of animals
and mining machinery - are amplified, cutting
through the still, cold air of the mountaintop.
As Bibicha delves deeper into silence, however,
the real voices and sounds she hears mingle with
those of her imagination. A monologue voiced
by her grandmother seems to come from the
old radio on the window sill. She has a vision
of her mother during pregnancy, and hears
what sounds like her own foetal heartbeat.
The sound design by Ranko Paukovic is
complemented by an electroacoustic soundtrack
by Danish artist Jacob Kirkegaard. Kirkegaard
is well-versed in the sounds of interiority, and
what we hear when there is ostensibly nothing to
hear. One of his best-known works is Labyrinthitis
(2007), a composition/installation that explores
the phenomenon of otoacoustic emissions,
sounds generated within the inner ear. This
seemingly impossible process happens when two
particular frequencies are played at the same time;
the distortion caused creates the third sound.
For Kirkegaard used the sounds
generated in his own inner ear as the basis for a
composition, reproducing them at an audible
level and combining them with more clashing
frequencies to generate further sounds, resulting
in a gradually unfolding sequence of descending
tones. When the piece is installed, Kirkegaard
sets up speakers in a spiral shape that reflects
the structure of the cochlea, so the listener can
move through the space as if drawn deeper into
the ear itself. The slowly shifting tones he uses
for 40 Days of Silence recdll this piece timbrally,
but also conceptually, as the music is deployed at
moments when Bibicha’s dreams, imagination
and inner life are to the fore - at the rare moments,
too, when she is actually afforded some silence.
The choice of a predominantly electronic
soundtrack for this film is an inspired one.
The themes of tradition, spirituality, ancestral
wisdom and geographical isolation all point to
an ethnomusicologically ‘correct’ soundtrack
using the natural soundscape of the area plus
its indigenous music. These elements are used
sparingly in the film’s diegetic sound, but
alongside synthetic, alien-sounding drones that
hover throughout like long clouds over the
mountains; elsewhere, there is a faint suggestion
of bells or flutes in the music, but they are at the
very least heavily processed, if not electronically
generated. At times Kirkegaard’s soundtrack
hovers on the edge of silence itself. The composer
favours pitches at the outer reaches of what
the ear can comfortably hear. In a track titled
‘Cave’ on the recent release of the soundtrack
album on the VON Archives label, deep swells
of sub bass that are felt rather than heard pulse
slowly beneath distant, barely-there metallic
tones; the impression is of a vast, mysterious
52 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
PRIMAL SCREEN
THE WORLD OF SILENT CINEMA
Before World War I, concerns over German military power^
spurred an invasion-themed science-fiction cycle
40 Days of Silence
The slowly shifting tones of the
music are deployed at moments
when dreams, imagination
and inner life are to the fore
space, a vista that could stand in most obviously
for the film’s remote location, but also hints
at the psychological depth of the narrative.
While 40 Days of Silence ends ambiguously,
it does so positively, with Bibicha smiling into
sunshine, having achieved her goal; the music
likewise offers a simple, skeletal melody that
emerges tentatively from the abstraction of the
rest of the soundtrack. But the music’s foreboding
atmospheres, combined with disturbing dream
sequences that hint at past trauma, tell us that
Bibicha’s search for autonomy or understanding
The cover of the film’s soundtrack album
is precarious. It’s even, in the context of the
8 highly traditional world she lives in, dangerous.
I As she communes with her ancestors, she is not
g reassured - her grandmother’s stories, narrated in
I a calm voice, are of child marriage, war, violence
I and loss. She observes her aunt’s sadness and
I the tension between her urban and rural lives,
I and experiences her surroundings with a newly
I found intensity that almost destroys her. The
S womanhood she will attain at the end of her
I silence seems full of fear and hardship, for all its
I warmth and community. As the film ends you
I find yourself asking where her quest will take
d her - back to the fold, or far away from it? ©
By John Oliver
The abiding influence of H.G. Wells permeates
‘Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder’, the BFI’s two-
month-long celebration of film and television
science fiction. Considering the contemporaiy
popularity of the author’s ‘scientific romance’
novels, it is little surprise that a range of
the subjects explored in his works was
appropriated by early British science-fiction
cinema. Wells’s influence can be felt in the
titular substance of The Pmfessor’s Anti-
Gravitational Fluid (1908), for example, or the
growth serum in Father’s Baby Boy (1909), or
the invisibility featured in The Invisible Dog
(1909) and Professor Hoskin’s Patent Hustler
(1914). Despite the popularity of Wells’s 1898
novel The War of the Worlds, however, alien
invasions and extraterrestrial encounters
were conspicuous by their absence. There
were invasions in early British science-fiction
cinema, but they originated closer to home.
The near-future invasion story, in which
Britain is assailed by foreign hordes of
invariably Germanic extraction, can be traced
back to Lieutenant-Colonel George Tomkyns
Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871).
Describing the successful invasion of Britain
by a superior German force, the pamphlet’s
success initiated a trend of novels that lasted
well into the next centuiy. The near-future
invasion theme reached British cinemas in
1909, the release of three such films in that
year possibly being related to the ‘Naval
Scare’ that erupted in March, when debates
in parliament over escalating expenditure on
ship-building reignited public concerns over
the growing military power of Germany.
The Invaders (1909) set the template
with a foreign invading force (seemingly
unnamed but we know who) successfully
routed by the territorial army after occupying
the house of the film’s heroine. The Airship
Destroyer (1909), with its fleet of enemy
airships attacking England, may have been
inspired not Just by concerns over Britain’s
defence but by Wells’s 1908 novel The War
in the Air, which prophesied the destruction
of cities by airship bombing raids. (Louis
Bleriot’s historic flight across the English
Channel in July 1909 may also have had the
psychological effect of making Britain appear
more susceptible to attack and invasion.)
Little is presently known about the third film,
England Invaded (1909), other than that it
featured Leo Stormont, a music-hall artiste
known for his singing of patriotic songs.
Although the possibility of aerial conflict
and bombardment was gaining traction in
the public consciousness, and was to feature
in such non-invasion films as The Aerial
Submarine (1910) and The Aerial Anarchists
In early British scifi cinema,
alien invasions were
conspicuous by their absence
Watch the skies: The Airship Destroyer (1909)
(1911), it does not appear to have featured in
a near-future invasion film again until World
War I initiated a second flurry of such titles.
Although the first of these, England’s Menace
(1914), depicting the exploits of a young girl
as she foils the invasion plans of an unnamed
foreign power, was released in June, Just
prior to the assassination of Archduke Franz
Ferdinand, the remaining films - at least those
that have been identified - appeared after the
outbreak of war. Unsurprisingly, some shared
an anti-pacifist theme. For the Empire (1914),
Wake Up! Or, a Dream of Tomorrow (1914) and
An Englishman’s Home (1914, based on a play
by Guy du Maurier first staged in that key year,
1909) all feature pacifist characters, including a
vicar in For the Empire, who become convinced
of the necessity of war after having directly
experienced - or, in the case of the second film,
dreamed of - life under an invading army.
If England Were Invaded (1914), based on a
story by the prolific future-war author William
Le Queux, features a typical scenario with the
British army successfully repelling a German
invasion force that, after landing on the Norfolk
coast, occupies the home of the lead character
(Denis Gifford in The British Film Catalogue:
Fiction Film states that this film, released in
late 1914, was made the previous year).
The invasion forces in those films presumably
arrived by sea - none of the titles in this second
phase of films are known to survive - but The
Great German North Sea Tunnel (1914) posits
another method by which the Germans could
invade: tunnelling all the way from Germany.
Lancelot Speed’s later animated film The
U Tube (1917) featured a similar enterprise,
but one treated in a humorous vein.
Other than the late arrival of The U Tube,
near-future invasion films appear to have
run their course by 1915, with only two films
seemingly released that year: Aerial Invasion
Frustrated, with the return of the airborne
invader, and When the Germans Came. The
production of the latter film, part of a series
of comedies featuring Joe Evans in his Piecan
character, seems to confirm the decline of the
near-future invasion film: the invaders here
appear to be part of a scheme cooked up to
dispose of a nagging mother-in-law. When
invaders have become part of a mother-in-law
Joke, you Just know that their day is over. ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 53
WIDE ANGLE
EXORCISE REGIME
Permanent night: Ventura and Vitalina Varela in Horse Money, Pedro Costa’s exploration of the lingering trauma of Portugal’s 1974 revolution
Pedro Costa’s first fiction feature
since 2006 is just one of the assaults
on cinematic convention found
in Toronto’s Wavelengths strand
By Jason Anderson
With the urge to make the wisest use of a
festival programme that’s as generous - or, to
be less charitable, as ridiculously overstuffed
- as Toronto’s comes a serious risk of travel
fatigue. Constantly flitting between photogenic
urban locales, treacherous global hot zones
(or their facsimiles) and destinations that
seem more reassuringly exotic to Western
observers, viewers can’t help but feel they’re
in every place and no place at once. Inevitably,
their eyes grow less sensitive to the specifics
of the environments on screen and more apt
to perceive them as expressions of the same
set of characteristics: urban and gritty, rural
and quaint, scorched and threatening.
Pedro Costa has rarely presented stories or
places that are so easy to parse. The Portuguese
filmmaker continues to offer unfamiliar, deeply
affecting and sometimes uncanny glimpses
into the world of his subjects, the poor Cape
Verdean immigrants who exist at Lisbon’s
geographic and economic periphery. His first
fiction feature in eight years and one of the
most startling entries in Toronto’s Wavelengths
programme. Horse Money is even more brazen
than its celebrated predecessors when it comes
to bending cinema’s usual rules about the
time and space(s) that characters occupy.
Indeed, Costa has resisted the prevalent
interpretation of Horse Money as a sort of
existential ghost story in which its central figure
- a former construction worker named Ventura,
whose weathered dignity made him both an
anchor and entry point for Costa’s Colossal Youth
(2006) - has slipped beyond the boundaries of the
material world into an eerie zone of permanent
night. So evocative of German expressionism
and the noir-ish horror films (and vice versa)
that Val Lewton made for RKO in the 1940s, its
chiaroscuro lighting of gloomy hospital corridors
and menacing streetscapes would support such
a take. The same is true of the film’s most overtly
surrealist sequence, which conveys Ventura’s
torments as he shares an elevator with a silent
man who is suited and bronzed like a toy soldier.
(Audiences of the 2012 omnibus film Centro
historico saw an early incarnation of this scene.)
Costa seems to have responded to the final
destruction of Fontainhas - the slum where he
filmed Colossal Youth and its companion works
Ossos(igg-/) mdln Vanda’s Room (2000) -hj
replacing it with a more stylised environment
of his own imagining. Yet to consign this vision
to the realm of the fantastic is to devalue the
starkly powerful elements of the real that Horse
Money also contains. Instead, what we see here
is a collision between cinematic history (with
Straub hovering over the proceedings next
to Lewton’s ghost) and the authentic stories
of suffering experienced by Costa’s subjects.
The latter can be discerned in the trembling of
Ventura’s hands, the result of a nervous disease
that afflicts Costa’s friend and leading man, or the
emotionally devastating account of loss given by
Vitalina Varela, Ventura’s companion, in another
sequence set in a Kafkaesque bureaucracy.
Costa’s intention with Horse Money wdiS
to expose and expunge the fear and trauma
that the 1974 Portuguese revolution caused
for Ventura and other members of Lisbon’s
chronically neglected immigrant population.
Exorcism is the operative word here - ‘Sweet
Exorcist’, a title borrowed from Curtis Mayfield,
was the name of Costa’s segment in Centro
historico. (Costa has a passion for radical-
minded African-American music of the 1970s:
he had originally enlisted Gil Scott-Heron to
collaborate on Horse Money, but that plan was
scuppered by the musician’s death in 201 1.)
During the introduction to Horse Money’s first
public screening. Wavelengths programmer
Andrea Picard described it as a film that “renews
our faith in the art form”. For once, the phrase
wasn’t hyperbole - nothing else at Toronto had
anything like its unsettling, disorienting force.
That said, the latest edition of Wavelengths
hardly suffered from a lack of strength, with
Horse Moneyheing presented alongside Lav
Diaz’s From What Is Before, Lisandro Alonso’s
Jauja, Eugene Green’s La Sapienza and Matias
Pineiro’s The Princess of France, all of which
have already attracted praise in these pages.
Two further films having their North
American premieres at Wavelengths after bows
at Venice didn’t match those standards, but had
many moments of comparable boldness. Fires
on the Plain-Tsukdimoto Shinya’s adaptation
of the Ooka Shohei novel, previously adapted
by Ichikawa Kon in 1959 with justly revered
results - is an assaultive depiction of the horror
54 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
and obscenity of war that strives hard to be more
horrific and obscene than most It is the story of a
Japanese soldier who endures illness, starvation
and brutality on an island in the Philippines
during the last months of World War IL As you
might expect from the maker of the Tetsuo films,
Tsukamoto amplifies the grisliest and most
hallucinatory elements of Ooka’s novel. Though
subtlety is not the film’s strong suit - it couldn’t
be, given the fixation on eviscerated bodies and
cannibalistic urges - it’s still Tsukamoto’s most
effective and fully realised effort in a decade.
The third feature by New York’s Benny and
Joshua Safdie, Heaven Knows Whathuuows
deep into a city that bears little resemblance
to the hipster wonderland seen on Girls. This
is New York as experienced by Arielle Holmes,
a homeless heroin addict who the Safdies
befriended, after spying her in a subway station,
and encouraged to write about her experiences.
Her unpublished memoir was the basis for the
script by the brothers and Ronald Bronstein,
their collaborator on the lighter-hearted Daddy
Longlegsidkdi Go Get Some Rosemary , 2009).
Holmes plays a fictionalised version of herself,
an alternately wilful and self-destructive young
woman caught in a junkie’s relentless cycle of
scoring and scamming as she tries to claw her
way out of a bad romance with her abusive
metalhead boyfriend (Caleb Landry Jones of
X-Meru First Class and Antiviral). A stylistic
descendant of Jerry Schatzberg’s The Panic in
Needle Park(igyi), Heaven Knows What can be
gruelling but is remarkable for the volatile energy
exuded by the cast (many of them bona-fide
street youths), Sean Price Williams’s nimble
camerawork, and a soundtrack of bruising 70s
electronica by Isao Tomita and Tangerine Dream.
With its drive to create the most fiercely
naturalistic representation possible of Holmes’s
experience. Heaven Knows What ends up closer
in style to a conventional documentary than did
many of the nominally non-fiction selections in
the Wavelengths programme. The most playful
of these is Ppisode of the Sea, a delightful black-
and-white curio that the Dutch duo Lonnie
van Brummelen and Siebren de Haan made
in collaboration with the inhabitants of Urk, a
town in central Netherlands that was an island
fishing village until the government drained the
surrounding inland sea to create new farmland.
Nevertheless, the citizens have steadfastly
maintained their working lives as hardy North Sea
fisherfolk while preserving their distinct cultural
identity and dialect. Over two years of shooting.
The Old Man of Belem
Heaven Knows What
van Brummelen and de Haan developed an array
of scenes that convey their subjects’ attitude
of defiance toward the economic and social
pressures bearing down on their community.
With blank-faced residents declaiming against
restrictive European fishing policies, Ppisode of
the Sea feels like a mix of ethnographic study
and community theatre project as directed by
Aid Kaurismaki. Many of the best jokes are
contained in the droll passages of text by the
filmmakers, who concede that their dedication
to shooting on fast-disappearing film stock is
evidence of the same stubbornly antiquated
sensibility they see in the people of Urk.
The experience of reading is also of paramount
importance in Le Beau Danger, German filmmaker
Rene Frolke’s suitably complex portrait of
Romanian writer Norman Manea. Frolke
intersperses meaty excerpts from Manea’s essays,
memoirs and novels with scenes of their rumpled
author appearing at book fairs and on Italian talk
shows and meeting the many demands placed
on public intellectuals. In the process, the film
conveys much that’s ineffable about the trauma
of exile and the gap between a writer’s public and
private selves. Just as interesting to Frolke are the
interpretative processes for his film’s viewers as
they navigate the spaces that open up between
these images and Manea’s clear-eyed accounts
of despair and deprivation as experienced at
other points in recent European history.
An equally provocative essay film by the
Seoul-born, US-based artist and filmmaker
‘Fires on the Plain’ is a depiction
of the horror and obscenity of
war that strives hard to be more
horrific and obscene than most
Fires on the Plain
Soon-Mi Yoo, Songs from the North is similarly
incisive and uncommonly unsensationalistic in
its consideration of the North Korean mindset.
Weaving together grimly amusing snatches of
cultural propaganda, archival footage and video
that the artist shot (sometimes clandestinely)
during three trips north of the DMZ, Yoo skirts the
tendency to ridicule the people who must endure
the country’s ceaseless stream of patriotic prattle
and paternalistic myth-spinning. Perhaps that’s
because she refuses to see them as dupes or alien
others, largely because her own feelings about
the North are rooted in her relationship with her
father, a leftist law student who stayed behind
when his comrades headed north after the war.
Another personal reflection on the pain, fear
and suspicion that are bom of political and social
division. The Policeman’s House (BeitHa’Shoter)
is a 2 5-minute video in which visual artist and
filmmaker Michael Zupraner reflects on his very
thorny position as both an Israeli Jew living in
the Palestinian city of Hebron and the occupant
of a small white house that has been of great
strategic and symbolic importance to his Arab
and Jewish neighbours alike. Again avoiding the
polemical elements common to films from either
side of the conflict, Zupraner makes deft use of
multiple screens as a visual counterpoint for
the irresolvable divides in his own thinking and
feelings as well as the rigidity of the physical and
psychological borders that stymie his community.
Zupraner’s film is also a testament to
the strength and breadth of short works in
Wavelengths. (In fact, the strand had been one of
only two at Toronto to feature shorts until this
year’s addition of an international slate, headlined
by a new short by Claire Denis.) A superb
programme of films by Portuguese directors
suggests that Costa is hardly alone among his
compatriots when it comes to venturing beyond
boundaries and upending expectations. The
Old Man of Belem, for instance, is a typically
masterful and drolly amusing contribution by
Manoel de Oliveira that entails an imagined
meeting in the garden of eternity between four
giants of the European literary canon - Luis
Vaz de Camoes, Miguel de Cervantes, Camilo
Castelo Branco and Teixeira de Pascoaes - and
a lively discourse on the vagaries of fate as
they are related in their respective oeuvres.
Though the 1 6th-century poet is on his
best behaviour in De Oliveira’s film, Camoes
becomes a far more anarchic figure for the
purposes of Gabriel Abrantes. The US-born,
Lisbon-based artist and filmmaker showed a
similarly refreshing lack of veneration for Manet’s
masterpiece in his i6mm diptych Olympia I &
II (2006); his latest, Taprohana, is a scabrously
funny, handsomely mounted fantasy that recasts
Camoes’s political and artistic struggles during
his banishment to what we now call Sri Lanka
in enthusiastically scurrilous and decidedly
coprophilic terms. A shipwreck, frolicking nude
muses and the rescue of the Portuguese language
from certain doom all figure in the ensuing
action, which marries a rare degree of Python-
worthy lunacy to headier themes. We last see
Camoes at a boundary point between heaven and
hell - as with poor Ventura, it’s hardly a foregone
conclusion as to which direction he longs to go. ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 55
“Filmmaking of the first order ”
Geoff Andrew, LONDON FILM FESTIVAL
“Beautiful, bold, intently serious. ”
Robbie Oollln, THE DAILY TELEGRAPH
PALME D'OR
FESTIVAL DE CANNES
“A stunning picture. . .Bilginer gives a
magnificent performance.”
Xan Brooks, THE GUARDIAN
“Superbly acted”
Jonathan Romney, THE OBSERVER
MEMENTO EILMS PRESENTS
VINTER SLEEP
A FILM BY
NURI BILGE CEYLAN
““Nuri Bilge Ceylan is at the peak of his powers with Winter Sleep, a
richly engrossing and ravishingly beautiful magnum opus.”
Justin Ohang, VARIETY
““The film is a tour de force of writing, acting and subtly meticulous mise-en-scene. . .
Gorgeous to look at, and packed with astute psychological, social and ethical insights...
a marvellous achievement”
Geoff Andrew, SIGHT & SOUND
76 The Imitation Game
The eager-to-please screenplay plays its own imitation game,
in being beholden to formula (‘A Beautiful Mind’ for one) - a
manufactured quality that occasionally creeps into Benedict
Cumberbatch’s otherwise committed, fastidious performance
58 Films of the month
64 Films
94 Home Cinema
104 Books
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 57
FILMS OF THE MONTH
Birth of a nation: a sequence featuring the Mozambique Liberation Front (Frelimo) lets us hear directly from the anti-colonial resistance movement
Concerning Violence
Sweden/Denmark/Finland/USA/Norway/
Germany 2014
Director: Goran Hugo Olsson
Reviewed by Ashley Clark
Goran Hugo Olsson’s Concerning Violence is the
first major film to grapple with the work of the
influential Martinican author and psychiatrist
Frantz Fanon since Isaac Julien’s biographical
documentary Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask
(1995). Whereas the earlier film took a holistic, if
esoteric, approach to appraising Fanon’s life and
ideas (including his upbringing in Martinique,
education in France and work in Algeria), the
punchy Concerning Violence focuses on a specific
sliver: the opening chapter of Fanon’s classic text
The Wretched of the Earth (1961), in which the
author posits the act of one nation colonising
another as a form of pure, subjugating violence.
Fanon also discusses violence - in the context of
uprising and rebellion - as a means of liberation
and physical, spiritual catharsis for the oppressed.
When Fanon’s book was initially published
in France, it was banned almost immediately
by the authorities, who saw it as a recklessly
incendiary glorification of violence. This
negative view was only burnished by the book’s
preface, written by Fanon supporter Jean-
Paul Sartre, which wholeheartedly endorsed
the thesis of violence as a cleansing act and,
according to Fanon biographer David Macey,
overshadowed the actual work. However, as
the academic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
explains in the brief, informative contextual
preface that begins Olsson’s film, such a reading
fails to appreciate Fanon’s nuance; specifically,
it neglects to address his anguish - rooted
in the realities of his experiences in French-
ruled Algeria - at the cyclical, decidedly non-
glamorous tragedy of the very poorest people
being reduced, and subjected, to violence.
Concerning Violence, then, represents a welcome
attempt to reframe and interrogate an influential
but highly contested historical text. As in his
previous film. The Black Power Mixtape 1967-
igyg (2011), Swedish director Olsson has raided
the TV news archives of his home country and
emerged with a fount of grainy, absorbing footage,
presumably hitherto forgotten. He structures
the material into nine chapters of varying
length (the film’s subtitle is Nine Scenes from the
Anti-Imperialistic Self-Defense), and each focuses
on a specific struggle for liberation in one of a
number of African countries, including Angola,
Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique,
Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso; the footage
dates from the mid-1960s up to the late 1980s.
Though at first glance Concerning Violence
may seem almost utilitarian in its stark, unfussy
formalism, Olsson puts his personal stamp on
Fanon’s work. Complementary passages from
the text are narrated over the images by singer
and activist Lauryn Hill, whose delivery -
throaty and languid, but also somehow urgent
and incantatory- seems designed to evoke
the alacrity of the book’s writing: Fanon was
terminally ill with leukaemia when he set to
work, and he composed and dictated it to his
wife Josie in a remarkable ten-week spell. For a
further rhetorical, stylishly pedagogical flourish,
much of the text is simultaneously imposed on
screen in a white serif font. At this year’s Berlin
Original sins: Scandinavian missionaries
58 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
International Film Festival, Olsson mentioned
that this device was inspired by the music video
for Prince’s state-of-the-nation anthem ‘Sign o’
the Times’ (1987). Also notable is Neo Muyanga’s
subtle score of roiling, percussive jazz, augmented
by peals of muted trumpet that ring out like
warning clarions. This forceful stylistic unity,
added to the binding agent of Fanon’s torrentially
persuasive and poetic language, ensures that
Concerning Violence resounds as a far more
cohesive statement than The Black Power Mixtape.
Olsson and his editing team structure
Concerning Violence so that the archival passages
comment on each other even as they are in
dialogue with Fanon’s text Consider two
back-to-back segments near the start. With
Fanon’s words, delivered by Hill (“For if the last
shall be first, this will only come to pass after a
murderous and decisive struggle between the
two protagonists”), ringing in our ears, the film
picks up with a black journalist, newly released
from a five-year jail spell in Rhodesia. He speaks
calmly of his realisation that, from slavery to
colonialism, and up to the institutionalised racism
and state-sanctioned torture in the country that
would become Zimbabwe, the “black man is at
the bottom of everything”; torture, he says, made
him “feel indifferent”. The following sequence,
also set in Rhodesia, is an interview with a quietly
seething white racist, rictus grin slashed across
his face, who’s unable to process the country’s
impending changes. For him, the servitude of
the black man is a fact of life (he casually refers
to his own servant as “you stupid thing”), and he
seems bent on denying the country’s majority
blacks the most basic, humane privilege (“They
all think they’re going to own houses’’^ The
inordinate, barely concealed aggression of the
white man makes for a striking contrast with
the measured, resigned tone of the black man,
and this clash of registers underscores Fanon’s
urgency. By the time of the film’s fourth segment,
‘A World Cut in Two’, even the most innocuous
imagery- white settlers enjoying a game of
bowls or golf while black servants quietly
stand by - rumbles with volcanic potential.
Another striking feature of Concerning Violence
is the choice of countries it features. Olsson’s
decision not to depict scenes of struggle in Algeria,
where Fanon was associated with the National
Liberation Front, is concomitant with his film’s
sensible avoidance, save for the short preface, of
a biographical take on Fanon, instead favouring
a broader perspective. As the academic Bhakti
Shringarpure has pointed out. Concerning Violence
focuses on decolonisation in Portuguese-speaking
areas such as Mozambique, Angola and Guinea-
Bissau, even though these countries represented
a fraction of the global anti-colonial movement
in an era when most colonies were under French
or British rule. Yet Olsson doesn’t let Sweden
off the hook. One galling segment is a news
documentary covering a strike by disgruntled
workers at a Swedish-owned mining company
in Liberia in 1966. It concludes with one striker
being unceremoniously fired, driven away with
his family and literally deposited in the middle
of nowhere to face an uncertain future. His boss,
a mild-mannered old Swedish man, doesn’t even
know why he was fired, but adds, “He was a very
good boy”. This sequence communicates the
layered nature of violence inherent in colonialism
— not just physical, but psychic and emotional.
Much of the footage Olsson has sourced is
extraordinary on its own terms. The sequence
The director forces the viewer
to face the devastating
corporeal consequences of
violence head-on, not simply
in a theoretical sense
featuring interviews with the Mozambique
Liberation Front (Frelimo) is especially valuable
because we get to hear directly from the
mouth of the resistance. Notably, Frelimo is a
mixed-gender outfit, and it is women who are
interviewed here (“There is no difference in
rights. We are at the same level”). Thematically,
this harks back to Spivak’s preface, which makes
a bold criticism of Fanon’s work for failing to
address sufficiently the “invisible long-term
structures of gendering” in both colonised and
coloniser. After journalists in Mozambique
have delivered grave reports of the Portuguese
colonial army burning down churches, schools
and orphanages, the chapter concludes with the
graphic, deeply upsetting image of an amputee
mother breastfeeding her amputee baby.
Then, in one of Olsson’s most stunning moves.
the Frelimo section segues into a brief chapter
simply entitled ‘Defeat’. Set to the haunting
strains of a Spanish-language folk lament,
it comprises nothing more than a montage
of shattered, defeated Portuguese colonial
soldiers gathered around the bloodied corpse
of a colleague. Olsson’s graphic juxtaposition
represents the antithesis of Sartrean swashbuckle,
and forces the viewer to face the devastating
corporeal consequences of violence head-on, not
simply in a theoretical sense. Here, Hill punches
out Fanon’s text (“At the level of individuals,
violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native
from his inferiority complex and from his despair
and inaction”), but the horrifying images force
viewers actively to critique as they digest.
This disturbing, layered film is mercifully
free of pat attempts to bring things up to date:
chronologically speaking, it concludes in 1987. Yet
there’s no doubt that its final passage - in which
Europe is described as “literally the creation of
the third world”, and America as a “monstrous”
colonial power - is intended to give the viewer
plenty to process with regard to contemporary
nations still suffering the pronounced after-
effects of colonisation. In many cases, Fanon’s
astringent words seem as relevant today as ever. ©
The pen and the sword: the film addresses Frantz Fanon’s exploration of violence in a colonial context
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Goran Hugo Olsson
Films, Final Cut for
Institute, Finnish
A film by Goran
Annika Rogell
Sophie Vukovic
Real, Helsinki Filmi
Film Foundation,
Hugo Olsson
Tobias Janson
Art Director
Production
Danish Film Institute,
Text
Stefania Malmsten
Companies
YLE,DR K, Nordic
narrated by
Frantz Fanon
Music Composer
A Story production
Film and TV Fund,
Lauryn Hill
Based on the book
Neo Muyanga
Co-produced by
MEDIA Programme,
preface by
The Wretched of the
Sound Design
Louverture, Final Cut
Sundance Institute
Gayatri Chakravorty
Earth by Frantz Fanon
Micke Nystrom
for Real, Helsinki Filmi,
Documentary
Spivak
Edited by
Sveriges Television
Film Program
Michael Aaglund
©Story, Sveriges
Supported by
Presented by Cinetic
In Colour and
DinoJonsater
Television, Louverture
Swedish Film
Media, Films Boutique
Black and White
[1.33:1] and [1.78:1]
Part-subtitled
Distributor
Dogwoof
A documentary based on the first chapter (entitled
‘Concerning Violence’) of the 1961 book ‘The
Wretched of the Earth’ by Martinican psychiatrist
and anti-colonial thinker Frantz Fanon. In nine
segments, all comprising archival material sourced
from Swedish television, the film explores various
liberation struggles in African countries, including
Angola, Zimbabwe, Liberia, Tanzania, Mozambique,
Guinea-Bissau and Burkina Faso. The footage covers
a period from the 1960s to the 1980s. The singer
Lauryn Hill reads selected passages from ‘Concerning
Violence’ over the images, and the words are often
simultaneously imposed on the screen. The main
body of the film is preceded by a short contextual
preface by the academic and philosopher Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 59
FILMS OF THE MONTH
FILMS OF THE MONTH
The Homesman
USA/France 2014
Director: Tommy Lee Jones
Certificate 15 122m 33s
Reviewed by Tony Rayns
Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
The Homesman has had a noticeably cooler
reception from conservative critics than The
Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005), largely
because Tommy Lee Jones’s second movie as
director is a good deal less generic than the first.
(Jones has also made a couple of films for TV, in
1995 and 2011, neither seen by this reviewer.)
Of course, The Homesman owes plenty to genre
traditions. The central ‘odd couple’ relationship
between a worldly man and a prim, religious-
minded woman goes back at least to Black
Narcissus (ig4y) and The African Queen{ig^T)
and probably much further, and the film as
a whole has the look and tone of revisionist
westerns of the 1970s. But the story’s twists and
emphases are often unexpected, and the shape
of the narrative overall fits no genre template.
The film is adapted from a 1988 novel by
Glendon Swarthout (1918-1992), a writer of
Anglo-Dutch parentage whose other filmed
books include Where the Boys Are, Bless the Beasts
and Children and The Shootist (Joseph H. Lewis’s
7th Cavalry is also drawn from a Swarthout
short story.) The book has been a Hollywood
property since it was published - Paul Newman
figures prominently in its development-hell
history - but its ‘feminist’ depiction of sexual
issues would almost certainly have been
compromised or even erased if it had been
filmed earlier. Jones approaches it as a brokeback
narrative, divided unequally between one man’s
selfish, this-is-all-there-is attitudes and one
woman’s god-fearing hope and idealism. The
way the two antithetical philosophies play out,
especially in the film’s final half-hour, makes
for a harsh and quite disturbing vision, unlike
anything else in recent American cinema.
Jones starts with sketches of the hard-scrabble
lives of settlers on the plains of Nebraska:
pumping water from a well, ploughing the
generally unyielding land, living in basic and
minimally furnished wooden shacks, barely
shielded from the elements. Before knowing who
they are or how they will be placed in the story,
we see vignettes of the four women whose plights
will drive the narrative. Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary
Swank) is the only spinster, vulnerable but tough;
her piety and bossiness scare off the neighbour
she offers to marry, and her mimed piano-playing
and slightly alarming singing voice don’t help
either. The other three have been driven insane by
the marital demands of their husbands, by losing
successive children to disease, or by the pressures
to be ‘feminine’ in this miserable environment.
The most startling vignettes show a man brutally
screwing his wife upright in a bam, and a woman
‘burying’ her dead baby in an outdoor cesspit. The
small community is largely Scandinavian but only
notionally religious; the measure of one woman’s
derangement is that she can say little but the
repeated phrase “God will strike you down”. Jones
and his co-writers make no sustained attempt to
characterise the three women individually; all
three are defined primarily by their gender-based
predicaments. Jones says in a press-kit interview
that he wanted to explore the female condition in
the mid-iqth-century American West “because I
Wagon train: Tommy Lee Jones as George Briggs and Hilary Swank as Mary Bee Cuddy
think it’s the origin of the female condition today”.
The challenge of transporting the three
women back east, initially to a Methodist
community in Hebron, Iowa, falls to Mary Bee
when she volunteers to draw lots for the task
in place of Vester Belknap, husband of one of
the women. She has little sense of the potential
hazards ahead until it’s pointed out that she’s
likely to encounter rapists, killers and hostile
American Indians en route. Her hook-up with
the reprobate George Briggs (Jones), a scuzzy
claim-jumper left to hang by vengeful farmers,
is equally random but more fortuitous. She
is pragmatic enough herself to realise that he
Speed the plough: Hilary Swank
will need more to motivate him into riding
shotgun on the journey than his gratitude to her
for saving his life, so she pretends to send $ 300
ahead to Hebron to reward him on arrival at
their destination. This small knot of deception,
greed and pragmatism sets up the ‘odd couple’
relationship which will dominate the film.
The journey itself, up to and across the
Missouri River, fills the middle hour. You couldn’t
call it uneventful, but the film deliberately
withholds the thrills and spills of traditional
westerns: there’s no exulting in the virgin
landscape, no sense of heroic endeavour, and the
small crises are not played as action set pieces.
Gun crazy: Tim Blake Nelson, Tommy Lee Jones
60 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
of grace, but when he burns down the Fairfield
Hotel because its unctuous and probably criminal
proprietor Aloysius Duffy (James Spader) refuses
him and the women a night’s rest, his act of
revenge is clearly driven by something more than
self-interest. His gains in moral fibre, though, are
snatched away from him on arrival in Hebron,
where he entrusts the women to the care of the
smug Altha Carter (Meryl Streep, the acme of skin-
deep gentility) and is sent on his way as if nothing
had happened. He spends the reward money on
a smart new suit, a bath and a carved headstone
for Mary Bee... and then loses the last when he
gets drunk on a riverboat. Briggs, in short, ends
up not far from where he began: living for the
moment, believing in nothing, rooting around
for a better life. The literal and metaphorical
journeys he has been on are the film’s real
subjects, and the sad truth he learns is existential.
There’s a curious mismatch between the film’s
rather old-fashioned style and sensibility and
its modernist subject and approach to plot. It’s
at once rather out of time and of the moment.
The storyline isn’t picaresque but it is daringly
episodic, particularly in its opening and closing
stages, and Jones leaves the viewer remarkably
free to draw inferences from the way the episodes
are strung together. Meanings and implications
are never signposted, but Jones succeeds
completely in redefining the psychological
western. George Briggs was bom to survive in
the film’s godless universe, and his encounters
with other folk - the god-fearing, the criminal,
the insane, the depraved, the genteel -ultimately
push him into reverting to type. But he does
have new clothes to show for the experience. ©
There’s a curious mismatch
between the film’s rather
old-fashioned style and its
modernist subject. It’s at once
out of time and of the moment
brief standoff with a group of young injun braves,
presented as excitable delinquents, is deflected
when Briggs cleverly gives them a horse to chase;
when one of the women escapes and Briggs finds
her hitched up with a solitary chancer, she saves
Briggs the trouble of dealing with her ‘rescuer’ by
killing him herself; and Mary Bee’s obstinacy gets
her left behind and lost for a day. The real drama
mnning through these scenes is the relationship
between Mary Bee and Briggs, each edging closer
to the other; the three women say little but
watch intently, their expressions unreadable
until they widen their eyes at the sight of Mary
Bee politely requesting Briggs to take her naked
body. (Briggs has already refused her offer of
marriage, and initially refuses sex too; he relents
only when she pleads, “Spare me my dignity, sir.”)
Typically, the film doesn’t try to explain
Mary Bee’s suddenly urgent desire to lose her
virginity... or her subsequent suicide. Her death
three-quarters of the way through the film is as
surprising as Marion Crane’s in Psycho, and it
hangs over the rest of the film in much the same
way. It transforms Briggs, whose first impulse is to
abandon the women (especially when he finds his
reward money hidden in Mary Bee’s bag) but who
needs little persuading to complete Mary Bee’s
task. It’s not that he attains anything like a state
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Merideth Boswell
Company and Ithaca
Mrs Polhemus
freighter
Peter Brant
Music
Films a Michael
Barry Corbin
Miranda Otto
Brian Kennedy
Marco Beltrami
Fitzgerald and Tommy
Buster Shaver
Theoline Belknap
Luc Besson
Sound Mixer
Lee Jones production
David Dencik
Jesse Plemons
Screenplay
Jose Antonio Garcia
Executive Producers
Thor Svendsen
Garn Sours
Tommy Lee Jones
Costume Designer
Deborah Dobson Bach
William Fichtner
Sonja Richter
Kieran Fitzgerald
Lahly Poore-Ericson
G. Hughes Abell
Vester Belknap
Gro Svendsen
Wesley A. Oliver
Richard Romero
Grace Gummer
James Spader
Based on the novel by
©The Homesman
Arabella Sours
Aloysius Duffy
Glendon Swarthout
Limited Partnership
Cast
Evan Jones
Hailee Steinfeld
Director of
Production
Bob Giffen
Tabitha Hutchinson
Photography
Companies
Tommy Lee Jones
Caroline Lagerfelt
Meryl Streep
Rodrigo Prieto
EuropaCorp presents
George Briggs
Netti Svendsen
Altha Carter
Editor
in association
Hilary Swank
John Lithgow
Roberto Si Ivi
with Peter Brant,
Mary Bee Cuddy
Reverend Alfred Dowd
Dolby Digital
Production Designer
TheJavelina Film
Jo Harvey Allen
Tim Blake Nelson
In Colour
[ 235 : 1 ]
Distributor
El Films
Nebraska, 1855. Devout spinster Mary Bee Cuddy
farms her own smallholding and looks for a husband.
Reverend Dowd announces that three women in the
small community have gone insane and need to be
taken back to Hebron, Iowa, for care; when Vester
Belknap (husband of one of them) refuses to escort
them, Mary Bee volunteers for the job. She is preparing
for the arduous 400-mile trip when she encounters
claim-jumper George Briggs, left to hang under a tree;
she frees him on his promise that he will ride shotgun
on the journey, and mails $300 ahead as his reward
for completing the task. They set off in a customised
wagon, beset by fears and privations. Briggs fends off
a party of hostile Native Americans by giving them
Mary Bee’s horse. One woman escapes, but kills her
rescuer when Briggs catches up with them. Mary Bee
asks Briggs to marry her; when he refuses, she gives
him her virginity anyway and next morning hangs
herself. Briggs finds the unmailed $300 among her
effects and tries to abandon the women, but relents.
They seek one night’s shelter in the Fairfield Hotel;
when proprietor Aloysius Duffy refuses them, Briggs
returns and burns the place down. On arrival in Hebron,
Briggs turns the women over to the care of Methodist
minister’s wife Altha Carter. He uses the $300 to buy a
smart new outfit and get a headstone carved for Mary
Bee’s grave, but then loses himself in liquor and song
on a riverboat.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 61
FILMS OF THE MONTH
FILMS OF THE MONTH
Sacro GRA
Italy/France 2013
Director: Gianfranco Rosi
Certificate 15 95m 12s
Reviewed by Jordan Cronk
Amid a wave of increased visibility for Italian
output, Sacro GRA’s Golden Lion victory at the
2013 Venice Film Festival stands as the most
unexpected triumph in the country’s recent
run of cinema accolades. Next to the gritty
intensity and sweeping expressionism of,
respectively, Matteo Garrone’s Gomorrah (2008)
and Reality (2012), or the gaudy opulence of Paolo
Sorrentino’s Oscar-winning The Great Beauty
(2013), the unassuming, observational nature of
director Gianfranco Rosi’s latest missive is almost
strikingly modest. But then, save for a slight
expansion in scale, Sacro GRA doesn’t represent
any kind of dramatic break in Rosi’s established
approach. If anything, the film’s Golden Lion
win - the first time in Venice’s history that its top
prize has been awarded to a documentary - is
more significant for the way it underscores how
rare it is for a major festival jury to give awards to
non-fiction filmmaking than it is in revealing any
particular evolution on the part of its director.
The Grande Raccordo Anulare motorway
- the GRA of the film’s title, which translates
literally as ‘Holy GRA - provides both a physical
and allegorical framework for Rosi’s images.
And accordingly the image seems to be Rosi’s
primary mode of articulation here. While the
GRA, an unbroken, ring-shaped road circling
Rome (“Like a ring around Saturn”), is employed
as the film’s nominal subject, it consistently
cedes command to community and countryside
alike. Rosi’s lens, mostly fixed at a remove,
yet occasionally inquisitive as life spills into
the natural environments surrounding the
GRA, captures the activity occurring along the
highway’s many miles in a serene, empirical
manner likely to be familiar to anyone who has
paid even the slightest attention to contemporary
non-fiction or non-narrative filmmaking. The
text of the film, despite a selection of recurring
individuals, is thus expressed primarily
through its images - flat, desaturated digital
compositions that Rosi wisely arranges as a
mostly spartan procession of architectural,
environmental and anthropological elements.
This geographical structuring conceit may
correctly imply some sort of grand thematic
schema, but there’s little apart from the proximity
of the GRA itself - which is heard or seen in the
distance of many shots - to help visually or aurally
integrate the individual components of each
sequence into Rosi’s greater aesthetic construction,
which proceeds in a democratic, though not
entirely coherent, fashion. In its perhaps
overly egalitarian approach to the elemental
and physiological properties of life along the
GRA, the film evinces a vaguely ethnographic
sensibility. The operative word being vague, as
Rosi never grants the viewer the opportunity to
fully absorb, or even make tangential connections
between, the landscape and the personalities to
which his camera is drawn. Perhaps privileged
moments with his subjects were at a premium,
but in sacrificing more intimate representation
for what will likely be read as metaphor -
and in an effort, it would seem, to preserve
some state-of-Italian-life-today address - Rosi
can only suggest each approach, ultimately
On the road: Sacro GRA drops in on the lives of some of those living in close proximity to the motorway
Rosi’s lens, mostly fixed at a
remove, captures the activity
occurring along the GRA
motorway’s many miles in a
serene, empirical manner
hindering himself from elaborating on either.
The results are therefore innately contradictory,
as Sacro GRA is at its most engaging when
the everyday characters seen on screen begin
to assert their various personalities, politics
and philosophies. Among others, there’s the
paramedic whom we follow in states of both
emergency and domesticity; the commerce-
conscious eel fisherman pushing against the
A bug’s life: recording the sounds of harmful weevil larvae burrowing through the country’s palm trees
62 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
tide of globalisation; the pair of middle-aged,
down-and-out women who live in an RV just off
the highway; the enterprising, cigar-chomping
patriarch who rents his family’s mansion out
to film, television and theatre productions; the
ageing father and grown daughter whom we
glimpse from outside their apartment window
discussing topics both personal and perfunctory;
and the environmental researcher who records
the sounds of harmful weevil larvae burrowing
their way through the country’s palm trees.
Each of these individuals is introduced, set aside
and then returned to at some point in the film,
though the rotation itself, apart from the inherent
circular motif, follows no analytic logic and the
visual presentation of each sequence - sometimes
detached, at other times probing - differs
depending on seemingly any factor, from the
given subject’s lifestyle to the chosen location.
While no greater contextual information is
offered, it’s implied that these people are meant
to represent any number of greater Italian social
castes, and by that rationale it’s a fairly diverse
group of participants. In the absence of descriptive
text or narration, the environmental researcher
helpfully provides the film with a thematically
sound, lightly philosophical dimension. While
recording and listening, eyes often closed, to the
sounds of the red palm weevil, he ruminates on
the insects’ “highly organised social structure”.
comparing the potential fate of the palms to that
of a man’s soul. Elsewhere, from a small room
in their apartment, the father-daughter duo,
always shot from the same high-angled vantage
outside their bedroom window, discuss wine,
airline travel, the neighbours and the daughter’s
marriage prospects. The fisherman, meanwhile,
complains about the prospects of importing
eels from other countries, while his assistants sit
quietly by, paying little attention to his grievances
- even his wife, who appears later in the film,
would rather read tabloid magazines than talk
business. There are other individuals introduced
- a pair of go-go dancers, a prostitute, an aspiring
local DJ - but apart from a few minutes of
screen time, their purpose and prospects are
left up to the imagination of the viewer.
Eor the sake of comparison, one might look
to Rosi’s previous film, the harrowing, highly
austere ElSicario, Room 164 (2010), which
benefited greatly from its self-imposed focus.
Set within a single hotel room on the US/
Mexico border, El Sicario consists entirely of
recollections from an anonymous, hooded
Sicarii assassin who sits before the camera and
draws diagrams detailing the untold number
of abductions, tortures and murders he’s
committed over the years (many in the very
same room in which the film is shot) on behalf
of both drug cartels and the Chihuahua state
police. In narrowing his purview and shrewdly
limiting the film’s production to only the most
elemental constituents, Rosi was able with El
Sicario to formulate a narrative and aesthetic
approach with the capacity to simultaneously
elicit empathy and assert its topicality without
excusing the heinous actions of his subject in
the process. Eor better or worse, in its attempt
to paint a broader view of contemporary Italian
society, Sacro GRA never fully establishes a
similarly intimate focus for the viewer.
This disconnect could partially be Rosi’s
intention. The director claims the film was
inspired by Italo Calvino’s 1972 novel Invisible
Cities, in which the explorer Marco Polo
poetically chronicles his lifetime of travels to the
ageing Chinese emperor Kublai Khan through
metaphysical observations and inquiries into
cities and borders, language and memories,
fears and desires. These more abstract concepts
(“The city does not tell its past, but contains it
like the lines of a hand”) do find an analogue
in the film’s visual syntax, which positions
shots of landscapes, skylines and architecture
between its scenes of interior and vocational
activity. In as much as images of everyday beauty
and banality can conjure feelings of transience
and existential reckoning, these moments are
evocative, if not exactly effective. Perhaps if
any of his subjects had been granted enough
time to elaborate on their respective plights or
professions, then Rosi’s thesis, coupled with
these mildly expressive images, might have
translated in fuller, more insightful form. The
word ‘snapshot’ is often used as shorthand to
describe films that take communities, countries
or cultures as their subject. In the case of
Sacro GRA, the term defines both the depth
of its vision and the extent of its scope. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Marco Visalberghi
From an original idea
by Nicolo Bassetti
Photography
Gianfranco Rosi
Editor
Jacopo Quadri
Sound
Gianfranco Rosi
©Doclab, La Femme
Endormie, Officine
UBU Distribuzione
Production
Companies
Marco Visalberghi
presents a
co-production of
Doclab, La Femme
Endormie
with Rai Cinema
With the financial
support of the
Direzione Generale
peril Cinema
With the support of
Regione Lazio, Filas,
Roma Lazio Film
Commission, CNC-
Centre National de
Cinematographie
With the assistance
of La Procirep and
ANGOA,FIDIab
Marseilles
With the
participation of Cine
In Colour
[ 1 . 85 : 1 ]
Subtitles
Distributor
Soda Pictures
A documentary recording life along the Grande
Raccordo Anulare motorway, which encircles Rome.
Beginning at night, the film features a cast of
everyday individuals, who are introduced, set aside
and then revisited in a kind of circular pattern. We
meet a paramedic whose work revolves around
the activities and emergencies of the GRA; an eel
fisherman concerned about the globalisation of the
fishing trade; a pair of middle-aged women who live
in a camper van just off the highway; an enterprising
gentleman who rents his family mansion out to
various film and television productions; a father
and daughter who spend much of their time in their
cramped apartment discussing mundane topics;
and an environmental researcher who, in between
philosophical musings on the intersection of nature
and humanity, records the sounds of weevil larvae
invading the country’s palm tree population. The
GRA, meanwhile, exists quietly in the background of
these people’s lives.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 63
FILMS OF THE MONTH
REVIEWS
Alexander and the
Terrible, Horrible,
No Good, Very Bad Day
Annabelle
USA 2014
Director: John R. Leonetti
Certificate 15 98m 38s
Reviewed by Violet Lucca
This very loose adaptation of Judith Viorst’s 1972
children’s book finds its strength in the way that
it has been updated for 2014. It gets the cultural
references right - one of the indignities Alexander
suffers is when an app flawlessly puts a photo of his
face on bikini models’ bodies and the pictures are
texted to the entire school But it also encapsulates
the energy and reality of contemporary family life
very truthfully: everyone has to be somewhere,
right now, or five minutes ago.
In this circus-like atmosphere of extracurricular
activities and smartphones, Alexander’s birthday
wish to spread his habitual bad luck quickly spirals
into a It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World territory
(This is largely bolstered by Steve Carell and
Jennifer Gamer’s chemistry and performances
as Alexander’s parents.) However, the biggest
departure from the book is that Alexander
routinely stops to consider how other people feel,
and although the film’s ‘lesson’ is articulated in
voiceover (despite being apparent without it), it
proves to be much more profound and less self-
centred than the original. ©
Family life: Steve Carell
Credits and Synopsis
Directed by
©Disney
Ms Suggs
Miguel Arteta
Enterprises, Inc.
Megan Muiiaiiy
Produced by
Production
Nina
Shawn Levy
Companies
Beiia Thorne
Dan Levine
A 21 Laps/Jim
Celia
Lisa Henson
Henson Company
Mary Mouser
Screenplay/
production
Audrey Gibson
Screen Story
Executive
Sidney Fulimer
Rob Lieber
Producers
Becky Gibson
Based on the book
Philip Steuer
Burn Gorman
by Judith Viorst
Director of
Jason Lust
Mr Brand
Photography
Cast
Doiby Digitai
Terry Stacey
in Coiour
Fiim Editor
Steve Careli
[2.35:1]
Pamela Martin
Ben Cooper
Production
Jennifer Garner
Distributor
Designer
Kelly Cooper
Buena Vista
Michael Corenblith
Ed Oxenbouid
International (UK)
Music
Alexander Cooper
Christophe Beck
Dyian Minnette
USA 2014
Sound Mixer
Anthony Cooper
Certificate PG
Steve Nelson
Kerris Dorsey
80m 59s
Costume Designer
Emily Cooper
Nancy Steiner
Jennifer Cooiidge
US, present-day. Alexander is repeatedly humiliated
at school, and finds out that a more popular boy
is having a birthday party on the same day as his.
At 12.01am on his birthday, Alexander wishes for
his family to have a really bad day so that they
can understand how he feels all the time. There
is a serious misprint in his mother’s new book,
which jeopardises her promotion; his brother fails
his driving test and is suspended from school
before the prom; his unemployed father has a
humiliating job interview; his thespian sister gets
a cold; and his baby brother eats a marker pen. The
family pulls together. Alexander’s father gets the
job, his mother keeps hers, and everyone enjoys
Alexander’s Australian-themed birthday party.
Reviewed by Adam Nayman
Of all the malevolent marionettes and
mannequins in movie history, the titular doll
of Annabelle is probably the laziest in terms of
actually getting up and killing people. Where
her forebears, from the Zuni fetish troll in Trilogy
o/Termr(i975) to Chucky in Child’s Play (1988),
took some exercise once in a while - scuttling
under couches and popping out of closets
to attack their human owners - Annabelle,
who was last seen resting safely behind glass
at the end of The Conjuring, subscribes to the
less-is-more philosophy of haunting. She’s
inert, but it’s strategic. Like all the best star
performers, she’s always ready for her close-up.
Annabelle was but a humble bit player in The
Conjuring, a moderately effective based-on-a-true-
ghost-story thriller that became one of 201 3’s
biggest box-office hits. As we’re living in the era
of the unnecessary prequel, some enterprising
soul decided that it was time to fill in the blanks.
(Spoiler alert: it was James Wan, the patron saint
of creepy puppets.) The result is something pretty
much unprecedented: an origin tale about a
literal dummy. Insert joke about the woodenness
of contemporary horror cinema here.
Set in a thriftily depicted 1969, Annabelle
exploits its period setting more actively than
The Conjuring. The opening scene, in which a
suburban married couple (Annabelle Wallis and
Ward Horton) wake up in the middle of the night
to discover that their next-door neighbours have
been killed by crazed cultists, tastelessly evokes
the Manson Family murders. From there it’s a
short trip to Rosemary’s Baby, the main characters
are named Mia and John, for goodness’ sake.
Relocated to sunny Pasadena after Mia gives
birth to a baby daughter - and hoping to leave
the bad vibes of the suburban satanist incursion
far behind - the couple move into an apartment
building so dilapidated and ominous that one
almost expects Roman Polanski to cameo as the
superintendent. Compounding the creepiness is
the fact that Annabelle, originally purchased by
Hello dolly: Annabelle Wallis
John as a gift for his doll-collector wife and then
junked when they moved house, seems to have
made the trip as well. Perched on the shelf just
above the baby’s bed, she’s a sinisterly grinning
symbol of an evil that won’t be so easily outrun.
But Annabelle is not just a symbol: she’s a
literal conduit for demonic forces. Growing
increasingly cheesier and more convoluted
as it goes on, Annabelle suffers from a lack of
galvanising actors in its cast. Director John
F. Leonetti stages one decent set piece in a
darkened storage locker that relies on lighting
and camera placement rather than jump scares,
and the film is handsome-looking overall. It’s
also erratically paced, with a very unpersuasive
late twist that makes Satan (or whichever
dark-arts heavyweight is behind the whole
thing) seem like a very bad planner indeed. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Joseph Bishara
A New Line Cinema
Steven Mnuchin
Sharon Higgins
Doiby Digitai/
Peter Safran
Production
presentation in
Brian Howe
Datasat
James Wan
Sound Mixer
association with
Cast
Pete Higgins
In Colour
Written by
Matthew Nicolay
RatPac-Dune
Eric Ladin
[2.35:1]
Gary Dauberman
Costume Designer
Entertainment
AnnabelieWaiiis
Detective Clarkin
Director of
Janet Ingram
An Atomic Monster/
Mia Form
ivar Brogger
Distributor
Photography
Safran Company
Ward Horton
Doctor Burgher
Warner Bros
James Kniest
©Warner Bros.
production
John Form
Distributors (UK)
Edited by
Entertainment Inc.
Executive Producers
TonyAmendola
[uncredited]
Tom Elkins
and RatPac-Dune
Richard Brener
Father Perez
Tree OTooie
Production Designer
Entertainment LLC
Walter Hamada
Aifre Woodard
Annabelle
BobZiembicki
Production
Dave Neustadter
Evelyn
Higgins, cultist
Music
Companies
Hans Ritter
Kerry O'Mailey
The US, 1969. Pregnant Mia and her husband John wake
in the night to discover that their next-door neighbours
have been murdered by a pair of cult members. The
murderers are killed when the police arrive. Before
dying, however, the female cultist (whose name is
Annabelle) bleeds into the eye socket of Mia’s prized
wooden doll - imbuing the toy with the woman’s spirit.
Strange things begin happening in John and Mia’s
home, seemingly orchestrated by the doll. Mia is
nearly killed in a fire, but survives to give birth to a
daughter. Lea. The couple decide to move to Pasadena,
and John throws away the burned doll - but when
they arrive at their new apartment they find that it
has somehow been packed in with their belongings.
Mia becomes increasingly convinced that the doll
is dangerous, and experiences visions of Annabelle
stealing Lea. Mia befriends an older bookstore owner
named Evelyn, who helps her with her research into
demonology. The couple call a priest to take the
doll away, but he’s brutally attacked by the ghost
of Annabelle; later, while John is at the hospital, a
demon steals Lea from her crib and instructs Mia
that she can trade her soul for her child’s. Mia goes
to jump out of the window (cradling the possessed
doll in her arms) but Evelyn stops her and volunteers
her soul instead, as a way of absolving herself for
own daughter’s accidental death. Mia and John go on
with their lives; the Annabelle doll remains at large.
64 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Bang Bang!
Director: Siddharth Anand
Certificate 12A 153m 12s
Bjork: Biophilia Live
United Kingdom 2014
Directors: Nick Fenton, Peter Strickland
Certificate U 96m 35s
Reviewed Naman Ramachandran |
It is pointless to expect coherence from L
Hollywood action tentpoles, and similarly it
would be churlish to deny Bollywood audiences
their fix in the name of logic. Bang Bang!,
the official remake of the 2010 Tom Cruise/
Cameron Diaz starrer Knight and Day, and one
of the highest budgeted Indian films of all time,
cheerfully dispenses with any sense of rationality
and instead genuflects at the sculpted body of
Hrithik Roshan as he performs Hollywood-style
stunts in a variety of global locations, pausing
only to show off his moves with Katrina Kaif as
they periodically break into song and dance.
There is a semblance of a plot in which the
theft of a diamond is meant to flush out the
whereabouts of a dreaded criminal, but that is
clearly secondary. This is the kind of film where
a handful of thugs can storm MI6’s headquarters
and get away without breaking sweat; and where
a bank receptionist with no previous training
can rescue her beau from an Indian secret service
stronghold. It is also a showcase for blatant
product placement
throughout, with
Roshan at one point
obligingly repeating
the tagline of a
soft drink he’s
just swigged. ©
Hrithik Roshan,
Katrina Kaif
Credits and Synopsis
Written by
Ahmed Khan
ParthAkerkar
Sujoy Ghosh
Stunt Co-ordinator
Robert
Suresh Nair
Conrad Palmisano
Kishan Gohel
Abbas Tyrewala
Parker
Based on the film
Production
Sreerag Nambiar
Knight and Day
Company
Naveen
(2010) written by
Fox Star Studios
Patrick O'Neill
Executive Producer
In Colour
Directors of
Sheel Nimbalkar
[2.35:1]
Photography
Vikas Sivaraman
Subtitles
Sunil Patel
Cast
Distributor
Editor
Hrithik Roshan
20th Century Fox
AkivAli
Rajveer Nanda, ‘Jai’
International (UK)
Production
Katrina Kaif
Designer
Harleen Sahni
Dipankar Dasgupta
Danny Denzongpa
Songs
Omar Zafar
Vishal-Shekhar
Jimmy Shergill
Background Score
Viren Nanda
Salim Sulaiman
Pawan Malhotra
Choreographers
Zorawar
Bosco Martis
JaavedJaffrey
Caesar Gonsalves
Hamid Gul
London, the present. As MIG hands over international
criminal Omar Zafar to the Indian army’s Colonel
Nanda for extradition, Zafar’s men free him and he
kills Nanda. Zafar puts out a call for the Koh-i-Noor
to be stolen. Rajveer sends word that he’s stolen
the diamond. After a shootout with Zafar’s men
in India, Rajveer uses bank receptionist Harleen
as cover to escape. Rajveer and Harleen leave a
trail of destruction across the world until they
track down Zafar. It is revealed that the diamond
wasn’t stolen after all - the supposed theft was
just a ruse to flush out Zafar so that Rajveer could
take revenge on him, as Nanda was his brother.
Reviewed Sam Davies
A caricature of Bjork already exists in
which she bounces, pixie-like, through the
world, cooing “Hello trees! Hello sky!” with
wide-eyed wonder. On a superficial level,
Biophilia Live doQsnU do much to change that,
capturing as it does the concert version of
her 2011 concept album, devoted - as the
name suggests - to hymning the wonder and
beauty of the natural world and cosmos.
Biophilia, and its live interpretation captured
here, is a much more subtle, complex and
delightfully weird work than that caricature
suggests. Shot at London’s Alexandra Palace in
201 3, Biophilia Live features Bjork supported by a
24-member female choir from her native Iceland
and a small group of musicians playing bizarre
instruments (some of which were invented to
record the original album). As a performance it’s
fairly straight: the musicians play in the round,
and some of the odder instruments - the huge
Tesla coil, for example - make for startling stage
furniture, but there’s no elaborate pyrotechnics
or constant costume changes by its star.
What transforms Biophilia Livedit the post-
production visuals. Bjork has a long history
of working in multimedia, and Biophilia’s
initial release was no exception, with every
track also ‘released’ individually as an app that
picked up on whichever scientific element
had inspired it - whether crystal formation or
the double helix. Her videos have never been
afterthoughts, knocked out under pressure from
the marketing department. Her work with Chris
Cunningham on ‘All Is Full of Love’, an uncanny
cyborg love-vignette, became a benchmark in
video production, and she’s also collaborated
with Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze.
Continuing in this vein, bringing in Peter
Strickland to co-direct Biophilia Live with Nick
Fenton is a quietly inspired choice. Strickland’s
films aren’t obvious calling cards for an artist with
Bjork’s futurist, maximalist aesthetic - Katalin
Vargds take on Transylvania’s muddy back-roads
and damp fields was distinctly naturalistic, and
the claustrophobic confines and playful retro
of Berberian Sound Studio aren’t an immediately
obvious fit either. But then you remember the
1 Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
©Wellhart Ltd/One
David
Jacqui Edenbrow
Little Indian Ltd
Attenborough
Director of
Production
Photography
Companies
In Colour
Brett Turnbull
A Gloria production
[1.78:1]
Editor
in association with
Nick Fenton
One Little Indian and
Distributors
Musical Directors
Wellcome Trust
Gloria Films,
Bjork
Executive
One Little Indian,
Matt Robertson
Producers
Wellcome Trust
All Music
Derek Birkett
Produced by
Emma Birkett
Bjork
Sound Design/Mix
Meroe Candy
Bjork
opening sequence
AddiSOO
voice
A concert film documenting icelandic artist Bjork
performing her seventh aibum, ‘Biophiiia’, at London’s
Aiexandra Paiace in 2013. Bjork is accompanied
by a 24-member choir and a smaii group of
musicians playing instruments invented for the
aibum’s recording. The performance is augmented
visuaiiy by nature imagery and animation.
Natural born singer: Bjork
latter’s lingering close-ups on smashed and
rotten vegetables, and its blood-red lighting, as
though Toby Jones was trapped inside an aortic
valve. (You recall too Strickland’s work with
experimental musicians such as the Bohman
Brothers.) Biophilia dwells unblinkingly on
the visceral and decaying, refusing a sanitised
version of nature for a warts-and-all vision - one
of its tracks is a love song devoted to a virus.
With co-director Fenton, Strickland embarks
on a process they describe as “colouring in”
Bjork’s performance. This proves to be an apt
phrase: the screen becomes not a surface but a
series of layers, as animations and archive footage
from nature documentaries swarm over, glow
through and grow around Bjork’s performance.
Mushrooms swell, bloom and subside in bulbous
miniature forests. Starfish conduct elaborate mass
courtships. Tiny creatures strip a larger one’s
bones in a time-lapse sequence that telescopes
death and disintegration into a matter of a
few fleeting frames. During ‘Hidden Place’, a
vertiginous depth is created by billowing clouds
that briefly seem to be a ceiling projection inside
the venue, until the eye realises this can’t be so.
With its introductory voiceover by David
Attenborough and obvious love for the simple
sublimity that the best big-budget nature series
achieve, Biophilia Izue appears to borrow the
trappings of documentary. But instead Bjork,
Fenton and Strickland have produced a near-epic
work of nature psychedelia, a strange hybrid
piece with a strange hybrid lineage that takes in
Disney’s Fantasia and Stevie Wonder’s ‘Journey
Through “The Secret Life of Plants’” diS much as
The Blue Planet But Biophilia Live also resists
a number of easy moves. There’s no didactic
environmentalism - no burning oil platforms
or seagulls marinated in Brent crude. It relies
instead on convincing the audience of the
preciousness of what it depicts. It also avoids
crude oppositions of nature and humanity. For
Bjork, technophilia is clearly a kind of subset
within her own personal biophilia. This is
audible at the level of the instrumentation, with
its buzz-saw synths, pendulums, Tesla coils and
invented instruments, but also visible in the
ingenious flow of animations and overlays. To
adapt a very old quotation, Biophilia Izue asserts
that nothing human is foreign to nature. ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 65
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Black Butler
Japan 2014
Directors: Otani Kentaro, Sato Keiichi
Certificate 15 119m 17s
Reviewed by Roger Clarke
Black ButlerhdiS a heavy burden to bear: it is the
live-action version of a wildly popular manga
series by Toboso Yana which has sold i8 million
copies worldwide and has been made into a
musical and three separate anime series. The ne
plus ultra of cosplay enthusiasts, it circumscribes
that strange zone where Japan has co-opted
Victorian/Edwardian English literature for a
new cultural synthesis, a cherry-picked aesthetic
via a Neverland of perceived gentility, a kind of
teen drag, a kawaii dolls-house Downton Abbey
with electronics and teacups and Shinto spirits.
The film has - you will not be surprised to
hear - a bevy of fashion models and teen idols
on board, and no fewer than two directors:
Sato Keiichi, an award-winning animation
director, seems to be tasked with maintaining
the manga integrity of the production,
while Otani Kentaro directs the actors.
The original manga comic has the young
aristocratic boy Ciel Phantomhive living in
Victorian England with a demon butler at his beck
and call; it’s a classic Eaustian pact, the soul-eater
waiting patiently for his employer’s death. In the
comic, both boy and demon are also responsible
for investigating a whole bunch of criminal
scenarios on behalf of Queen Victoria. It’s sad,
then, to see this aspect of the original completely
stripped away, for the fabulous and unassailable
reason that, according to producer Matsuhashi
Shinzo, “If the film were set in [the] 19th century
in [the] UK, it would be impossible for Japanese
actors to play the characters.” This is not in
any sense a version of the bestselling manga,
because that, apparently, is just too difficult.
But let’s look at the positives. Black Butleris a lot
of fun. Goriki Ayame plays the girl-pretending-
to-be-a-boy central character Kiyoharu/Shiori
with a kind of numb intensity, peering at the
baleful world through a curtain of hair, much
as her tousled alter ego the Black Butler does.
When she’s not sullenly looking into the mystery
of her parents’ assassination and maintaining
the comic fiction of being a boy, she seems to
be indentured to a crime-fighting organisation
and is sent to solve the mystery of a series of
killings that involve the victims being spookily
transformed into mummies. In the background.
Mind your manors: Ayame Goriki
an aunt hovers - we shall know more about
her by the end. Meanwhile the Black Butler -
Kiyoharu names him Sebastian after a beloved
dog - is a supernatural entity of remarkable
elegance, dispatching vulgar criminal elements
with a few flashes of a silver dining knife.
The costumes are stylised - fashion house
GalaabenD made Sebastian’s rather swish coat
with extra-long tails to emphasis his martial-arts
moves - and the film’s art design is pin-bright
and surreal, with the especially memorable
scenes in Kiyoharu’s family home (a kind of
theme-park Versailles) shot in the Arita Porcelain
Park in Saga Prefecture. This is - in the end - a
porcelain world. The booms of the fight scenes
and the neon-fissured establishing shots of
night-time in an Asian city never seem to trouble
the fragility of a place where the rich have both
money and supernatural power to tend to their
comfort, and yet are presented as appealing
gender-ambiguous victims. It’s Batman of course
-but Batman in which grumpy teen girls have
a compliant non-threatening boyfriend who is
threatening to everyone else. What’s not to like? ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Square Enix,
Wakatsuki Hanae
Matsuhashi Shinzo
“Kuroshitsuji”
Yamamoto Mizuki
Screenplay
Film Partners
Rin
KuroiwaTsutomu
Production
ibu Masahato
Based on the manga
Companies
KuzoShinpei
Kuroshitsuji by
Warner Bros. Pictures
Kishitani Goro
Toboso Yana
Japan presents in
Nekoma Saneatsu
Director of
association with
Photography
“Kuroshitsuji”
Doiby Digitai
AjisakaTerukuni
Film Partners
in Coiour
Editor
AC&I Entertainment
[2.35:1]
ImaiTsuyoshi
and Rockworks
Subtitles
Production Designer
production
Koizumi Hiroyasu
Distributor
Music
Cast
Warner Bros
MatzuraAkihisa
Distributors (UK)
Costume Designers
Mizushima Hire
TokunagaTakashi
Sebastian Michaelis,
Japanese
Shimizu Sumiko
‘Black Butler’
theatrical title
Action Director
Goriki Ayame
Kuroshitsuji
OuchiTakahito
Genpo Shiori,' Count
Genpo Kiyoharu’
©Yana Toboso/
Yuka
An alternate-reality Asian city, the near future. In
the luxurious Genpo mansion, a young butler tends
to the needs of ‘Kiyoharu’, the 17-year-old president
of the Funtom toy company. Kiyoharu has a secret
known only to the butler - he is in fact a girl. The
only survivor of an assassination attempt on her
family, she is masquerading as a boy while quietly
planning to avenge her parents’ death. The butler
is a demon and, in exchange for serving the Genpo
family, consumes their souls at the end of their
lives. Kiyoharu and the butler are also crime-fighting
vigilantes; they foil a people-trafficking group and
investigate a series of assassinations in which people
are killed by instant mummification. It transpires that
the assassin is Kiyoharu’s aunt Hanae: the deadly
pharmaceuticals she has developed to extend her
own life cause the mummification. In a dramatic
showdown, Kiyoharu and the Black Butler defuse
a necrosis bomb with help from a housemaid.
The Book of Life
USA 2014
Director: Jorge R. Gutierrez
Certificate U 95m 20s
Reviewed by Mar Diestro-Dopido
What if death were just another phase in our
lives, and our deceased loved ones were closer
than we thought? Drawing on Mexican folklore
and other Latin American traditions, Jorge R.
Gutierrez’s version of death in his beautiful,
witty 3D-animateddebut The Book of Life is
bursting with vibrant colours and magic - a
constantly expanding, neverending party.
Thus, as per Mexican tradition. La Muerte is
no pale, black-clad man brandishing a scythe
but a dazzling, intelligent female who cares for
everyone equally as she reigns over the Land
of the Remembered. Her wicked (and wickedly
charming) estranged husband Xibalba rules
over the Land of the Eorgotten, and both these
worlds come together once a year during the
famous celebrations of Dia de los Muertos,
when Muerte is the queen of life for a day.
It is on this very day that a group of ‘difficult’
kids is taken on a museum tour by a beguiling,
mysterious guide who introduces them to the
Book of Life that gives the film its title. Everyone’s
lives are documented in its pages. One of its
stories concerns a love triangle between three
amigos: Manolo, a bullfighter by family tradition
but a musician at heart; Marfa, the courageous
and smart daughter of San Angel’s town mayor;
and Joaqum, a valiant soldier-to-be with a good
heart yet undeniably self-centred. They will all
have to find their true selves before they can find
each other. With such a setting, it’s perhaps not
surprising that the first name in the opening
credits is that of co-producer Guillermo del Toro,
the Mexican filmmaker whose involvement in
this project has been characterised by Gutierrez
as that of “a very loving but strict professor”.
It’s an inventive, funny and genuinely touching
tale about growing up, finding happiness in the
happiness of others and, above all, the importance
of family and carving your place as an individual
within it. The theme of taking charge of your
own destiny is given a distinct feminist slant.
Gutierrez co-designed the characters with his
Mex appeal: The Book of Life
66 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
The Case Against 8
Directors: Ben Cotner, Ryan White
wife Sandra, and it shows; women here match
(or surpass) men in all spheres, be it wit, courage
or intellect And although it’s essentially
a love triangle with a woman at its centre,
Maria is far from being the princessy type.
Characters are not just well-rounded on the
page but almost tangibly three-dimensional;
Marfa and her suitors were made manually out of
wood, the baddies out of metal, and the evident
craft and attention to detail pays off, giving the
different worlds defining textures. The same can
be said of the soundtrack, composed by Oscar-
winning Argentine composer Gustavo Santaolalla
(Brokeback Mountain, Babel), who more than once
nods to adult viewers with unexpected ‘Latinised’
versions of songs such as Radiohead’s Creep.
Del Toro’s dictum has always been that stories
are what moves the world. Gutierrez takes this
idea and gives it a Russian doll spin - a story within
a tale, within another story kept in a book where
all the stories are written, be they true or made-up.
The thrilling narrative whisks the characters (and
viewers of all ages) from the sundrenched land of
the living to the centre of darkness through the
magical world of Death and back. Quite a ride. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Production
Maria
Guillermo del Toro
Companies
Channing Tatum
Aaron D. Berger
Twentieth Century
Joaquin
Carina Schulze
Fox and Reel FX
Screenplay
Animation Studios
Dolby Digital/
Jorge R. Gutierrez
present a Guillermo
Dolby Atmos
Doug Landale
del Toro production
In Colour
Editor
Executive
[2.35:1]
Ahren Shaw
Producers
Production
Aron Warner
Distributor
Designer
Cary Granat
20th Century Fox
Simon Vladimir
Chuck Peil
International (UK)
Varela
Music
Gustavo Santaolalla
Voice Cast
Sound
Christina Applegate
Supervision/
Mary Beth
Design
Ice Cube
Scott Martin Gershin
Candle Maker
Head of Animation
Kate del Castillo
Wesley Mandell
La Muerte
©Twentieth Century
Diego Luna
Manolo
Fox Film Corporation
Ron Perlman
and Reel FX
Xibalba
Productions II, LLC
Zoe Saldana
The US. Four ‘difficult’ young kids are taken on a
museum tour by a mysterious guide, Mary Beth.
Accessing the building by a hidden door, they end
up in the Mexican area, where Mary Beth, who has
a helper, shows them the Book of Life, in which all
stories are written, real and fictional. The guide
focuses on the story of childhood friends Manolo,
Marfa and Joaquin, whose love triangle is the focus
of a bet between two deities. La Muerte (Death,
who rules over the Land of the Remembered) and
her estranged husband Xibalba (the Lord of the
Land of the Forgotten). If Maria chooses valiant,
selfish Joaquin over sensible, generous Manolo,
the two deities will swap worlds. Marfa’s father,
the town mayor, sends her to a convent in Spain
to become a ‘proper’ lady; Joaquin enlists in the
army; and Manolo, a musician at heart, is trained
by his father in the family tradition of bullfighting.
Years pass until the three are reunited on the day
of Manolo’s first bullfight. He refuses to kill the
bull. After a series of tests, Maria marries Manolo.
Joaquin, after helping to save their town from evil,
becomes a hero by learning to be selfless. When the
kids leave the museum, Mary Beth and her helper
reveal themselves to be La Muerte and Xibalba.
Reviewed Ben Walters
Will-they-won’t-they is a pretty standard set-up
for movies about couples on the path to tying the
knot - but the obstacle is rarely one of legal and
administrative procedure. The documentary The
Case Against 8 tidiCts the progress of the ultimately
successful legal campaign against Proposition
8, the 2008 California state constitutional
amendment that blocked same-sex marriage. It’s
a view from the inside, drawing on testimony
from, and footage of, the activists, attorneys and
plaintiffs at the heart of the five-year campaign,
and this closeness is both its strength and its
weakness: the film offers an interesting and
moving sense of the case as a personal mission
for those involved but makes minimal effort
to communicate opposing viewpoints or
contextualise the fight within the broader
framework of the pursuit of LGBT rights.
It’s a story of three couples. Two of them -
Paul Katami and Jeffrey Zarrillo, Kristin Perry
and Sandra Stier - were the named plaintiffs
in the case. They come across as thoroughly
likeable, warmly affectionate, heartfelt and
sympathetic in their refutation of bigotry, but
not bitter or self-involved - testament both
to their own characters and to the extensive
vetting process, glanced at here, calculated to
select unimpeachably nice plaintiffs. Making
up the third couple - a professional rather than
romantic partnership - are lawyers Ted Olson
and David Boies, who represented George W.
Bush and A 1 Gore respectively in the Supreme
Court case that ultimately decided the 2000
election. The anti-Prop 8 campaign’s great coup
was to provide a common cause behind which
these two erstwhile foes could unite - though
rather than wary collaborators they appear
bosom buddies, each as nice as the other.
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Sound Editor
for HBO:
Ben Cotner
Henry Auerbach
Sheila Nevins
Ryan White
Camera
Production
In Colour
Rebekah Fergusson
Companies
[1.78:1]
Ryan White
HBO Documentary
Ben Cotner
Films presents
Distributor
Joe Anderson
a Tripod Media
Dogwoof
Edited by
production and a
Kate Amend
Moore’s Filmed
Music
Goods and
Blake Neely
Services film
Supervising
Executive Producer
A documentary about the legal challenge mounted
against Proposition 8, a 2008 California state ban
on same-sex marriage. The film follows plaintiffs
Paul Katami, Jeffrey Zarrillo, Kristin Perry and
Sandra Stier, attorneys Ted Olson and David Boies,
and staff of the American Foundation for Equal
Rights, which co-ordinated the legal challenge.
The team prepares for a 2010 federal district
court hearing, which declares the Proposition
unconstitutional, though same-sex marriages
remain illegal pending appeal. There are interviews
with those involved and we witness some family
occasions. Following further rulings and appeals,
in 2013 the case is taken up by the Supreme Court,
which rejects the Proposition’s supporters’ right
to bring a case on the basis that they weren’t
harmed by same-sex marriage. Same-sex marriage
having been affirmed as legal in California, the
plaintiffs marry in front of media and supporters.
Wedding planners: The Case Against 8
In fact. The Case Against 8 is nice to a fault,
not only in the amiability of its subjects but in
the lack of complexity or conflict with which it
presents one of the most contentious issues in
contemporary America and beyond. Directors
Ben Cotner, an executive at Paramount Pictures
and Open Road Films, and Ryan White, who’s
made documentaries about the Beatles’ secretary
and pick-up soccer, have said that they were
keen to document a chapter in their nation’s
history. They have indeed recorded much of
interest, especially in terms of the emotional
impact on the plaintiffs of cross-examination
rehearsals and the like, and have netted
themselves a Sundance award in the process.
Yet the film feels almost like a campaign video
in its rousing simplicity. Prop 8 was passed at
the ballot box but there’s hardly any attempt to
explore the thinking or feelings of those opposed
to gay marriage, and not a hint that some LGBT
campaigners have reservations about the issue’s
pre-eminence over other injustices. Even within
its own parameters, the documentary arguably
overstates the case’s ultimate importance, though
there’s no doubting its significance as part of a
shifting legal landscape. The film frustrates in
genre terms too. As courtroom drama, it suffers
from the lack of tension about the outcome, the
absence of video footage from court hearings
and haziness about exactly what’s at stake
at each stage of proceedings. It doesn’t really
satisfy as romance either because, as powerful
as some of the plaintiffs’ words are, we remain
only superficially engaged with their lives.
All this said. The Case Against 8 , like the case
itself, delivers where it counts, communicating
the pervasive, traumatic and sometimes
exhausting experience of being singled
out for exclusion and belittlement on the
basis of one’s sexuality. For this reason, the
emotional impact of witnessing our heroes’
quests end in marriage is considerable. ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 67
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Citizenfour
USA/South Africa/United Kingdom/Germany 2014
Director: Laura Poitras
Reviewed by Nick Bradshaw
For those who do not recognise Edward
Snowden’s revelations of enhanced domestic
spying capabilities as intrinsically terrifying,
the assurance largely goes that if you’ve
nothing to hide then you’ve nothing to fear
from machines built to record all possible data
about you. Snowden also has his critics who
argue that his flight from both line-managers
and prosecutors undermines his moral case
and forfeits what President Obama, excerpted
here, po-facedly dreams could have been an
“orderly... thoughtful, fact-based debate” that
would have “led us to a better place”. Convicted
WikiLeaker Chelsea Manning is not mentioned,
but these notions are otherwise countered in
Laura Poitras’s film by the experiences of NSA
veteran-turned-dissident William Binney (the
subject of her previous short The Program), never
questioned by Congress but escorted from his
shower one morning by government agents
at gunpoint, and by AT&T customers’ class-
action suit against warrantless governmental
wiretapping, stalled in court for a decade.
Snowden and others verbalise many of
the actual and hypothetical arguments for
privacy- the chilling, self-policing effects of “the
expectation that we’re being watched” on online
intellectual exploration; the improbability of
“meaningfully opposing” changes to surveillance
policy once the systems have been built. Brits
recently regaled with revelations of undercover
officers spying on murder victims’ families
and infiltrating the beds of environmental
campaigners may also be inspired to imagine
the worst. But far from just trading in conjecture
and abstraction, Czftzen^wrself-reflexively
dramatises the dangers that Snowden wants
to warn us about. Built around the eight days
in June 201 3 he spent with the filmmaker and
Gwardzh?? journalist Glenn Greenwald in a
Hong Kong hotel room divulging his secrets,
the film plays like a reality cat-and-mouse
spy thriller, with the trio out to expose the
dragnet before it catches them. Electrifyingly
the film shows us history in the making. Has
such a political actor ever before gone direct
to a filmmaker in the heat of the action?
To be sure, there are questions of nuance and
balance you’ll not find in this film, with its self-
selecting cast of liberty advocates. Poitras had
already wised up about US government watchlists
the hard way, after 40-plus airport interrogations
in the years following her work filming Iraq’s
2005 elections and their boycott in My Country,
My Country. She was already exploring a film
about US surveillance (to complete a trilogy about
American policy after 9/1 1, following 2010’s The
Oath, about Yemeni ex-jihadis and Guantanamo
Bay), and came to Snowden’s attention through
her film about Binney. Her journalistic ally
Greenwald had written about her travails before
Snowden recommended that she bring him
with her to their Hong Kong rendezvous, and he
constitutes one of the most strident, and eloquent,
voices in the film; he leaps on the information
trove and immediately, brilliantly, sets to battle.
This Hong Kong hotel chamber drama is,
unsurprisingly, the heart of the film. Poitras
tops and tails with other voices (Binney and
Secrets and lies: Edward Snowden
hacker Jacob Appelbaum, as well as security
chiefs James R. Clapper and Keith Alexander)
and locations, from the supersize data centre
the NSA is building at Bluffdale, Utah, to the
Guardian’s basement and the parliaments of
Brazil and Germany. But Snowden, in sundry
monochrome T-shirts and later a hotel robe, is the
earnest, fresh-faced, unlikely calm at the centre
of his storm. Unlike in Poitras’s earlier studies
of decision-making in the moment, Snowden
has already set out his stall: we watch him
watch the consequences. He’s remarkably lucid
setting forth his motivations and defending his
methods: he’s entrusting professional journalists
to decide what’s in the public interest and wants
to “remove his bias from the equation”; you could
torture him and he wouldn’t be able to divulge
encrypted passwords; if he were doing this for
profit there’d be far easier ways; he doesn’t want
to become the story but “anything to get this
out”; and he wants the target painted “directly to
my back” to take the heat off his family. He must
have endlessly rehearsed all this to himself.
A wry paranoia often prevails - in Snowden’s
attempts to teach Greenwald basic computer-
security sense; in the cloak, termed by Greenwald
his “mantle of power”, under which Snowden
hides to input computer passwords; and in the
black-comical barrage of phone calls and fire
alarms that later interrupt their discussions.
Snowden is at his most shaken after an update
from his forsaken girlfriend, and perhaps when
the prospect of an escape route finally presents
itself. But the basic optimism of his actions is
reflected in one characteristic exchange, when he
responds to Greenwald’s rallying cry about not
being bullied into silence by expressing hope that
the “internet principle of the Hydra” will apply,
and that “seven more will step up when I’m gone.”
As it happens, Poitras is able to end on
something of that note, finding Snowden now in
his Russian sanctum, rejoined by his girlfriend.
The news from Greenwald is that a more senior
whistleblower has emerged from another part
of the US government. Details are scanty, partly
because this brings the film into the present
moment, and partly because Greenwald and
Snowden communicate here in handwritten
notes which they then shred, though the
information in question seems to relate to recent
revelations about the government’s terrorism
watchlist and a direct command line to the US
president. Just as Alex Gibney’s We Steal Secrets:
The Story of WikiLeaks (2013) cautioned against
blind faith in leaders, so Citizenfouris shadowed
by an erstwhile reformer who rode social and
digital optimism to the White House. Poitras ends
on a shot of the shreds of paper. The revolution
will not be emailed, or recorded, or spoken.
But it could still make thrilling cinema. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Sound Recordists
Participant Media,
Filmforderfonds
MacArthur Fellowship,
In Colour
DirkWilutzky
Laura Poitras
HBO Documentary
Made possible
USA Rockerfeller
[1.78:1]
Producers
Judy Karp
Films in co-production
by support from
Fellowship,
Laura Poitras
with Bertha
Vital Projects
Anonymous
Distributor
Mathilde Bonnefoy
©Praxis Films
Foundation/BRITDOC
Fund, Cinereach,
Was a Woman
Artificial Eye Film
Filmed by
Production
Circle, Channel 4,
Sundance Institute
Executive Producers
Company
Laura Poitras
Companies
Norddeutscher
Documentary
Steven Soderbergh
Kirsten Johnson
BRITDOCand
RundfunkNDR,
Film Program,
JeffSkoll
Katy Scoggin
Artificial Eye
Bayerischer
Ford Foundation -
Diane Weyermann
Trevor Paglen
present a Praxis
RundfunkBR
JustFilms, Deutscher
David Menschel
Edited by
Films production
With support
Filmforderfonds DFFF
Tom Quinn
Mathilde Bonnefoy
in association with
from Deutscher
Additional Funding:
Sheila Nevins
A documentary about the augmentation of US state the impact of Snowden’s reveiations of eiectronic spying
surveiiiance powers in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks. capabiiities. Bookending the encounter are discussions
The f iim focuses on the 2013 rendezvous in a Hong Kong of further whistiebiowing experiences, inciuding that
hotei room between the fiimmaker Laura Poitras and of ex-NSA ‘crypto-mathematician’ Wiiiiam Binney and
NSA whistiebiower Edward Snowden (journaiists Gienn a new source who has made contact with Poitras’s
Greenwaid and Ewen MacAskiii are aiso present), detaiiing coiieague Jeremy Scahiii since Snowden came forward.
68 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Dracula Untold
USA/Japan 2014
Director: Gary Shore
Certificate 15 92m 11s
The Drop
USA/United Kingdom/Australia 2014
Director: Michael R. Roskam
Certificate 15 106m 25s
Reviewed Kim Newman
Bram Stoker most likely titled his novel Dracula
because he liked the sound of the name - in his
original outline, the villain was called Count
Wampyr. Stoker gives the count a speech
that suggests the undead vampire was in life
a Romanian prince who fought against the
Ottoman Empire. In 1972 the academics Radu
Florescu and Raymond T McNally published In
Search of Dracula, which influentially identified
the Dracula character with the historical Vlad
III, though Stoker probably knew or cared as
much about Vlad as Dumas or Rostand did
about the historical d’Artagnan or Cyrano de
Bergerac; it is now almost obligatory for Dracula
adaptations to play up the Vlad connection. The
first writer to give Dracula a Vlad-related origin
story seems to have been radio playwright Brian
Hayles, whose 1974 drama Lord Dracula was
developed by Hammer Films as an unproduced
project, Vlad theimpaler, for much of the 1970s.
Subsequent novels (Peter Tremayne’s Dracula
Unborn, Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian) and
films (Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s
Dracula, the TV movie Dark Prince: The True
Story of Dracula) have gone over similar ground
so often that this ‘untold’ version should more
truthfully be labelled the same old story.
Like everything from the Star Hhrs prequels
to Maleficent, Gary Shore’s Dracula Untold
follows the pattern of giving a famous villain a
comic-book-style origin story in which a thorny
character arc goes from naive decency to total
monster. Luke Evans’s brooding, chiselled, ripped
Transylvanian prince is a loving family man who
only impales an entire village “to save ten more”
and puts away his Gary Oldman-style dragon
armour hoping never to have to use it again...
until his family is threatened. Vlad strikes a
bargain with Charles Dance’s Nosferatu-look Old
Man of the Mountains (who seems to be patient
zero of vampirism) and is given superpowers
(mainly turning into a swarm of CGI bats but also
Wolverine-like rapid healing). Like Superman,
he needs a weakness to allow for a suspenseful
finale, so silver is his kryptonite: his enemy, the
wicked Sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper),
fights him on a carpet of coins and tries to drown
him in money. The superhero connection is
furthered as Vlad’s bland, saintly wife takes a
long, slow, Gwen Stacy-like death plunge to
motivate the next stage in his transformation.
With its studded leather outfits. Northern Irish
locations and relentlessly thudding dialogue,
this isn’t much of a medieval epic - but it’s not
much of a horror movie either, with weightless
CGI monsters that could have come from an
Underworldymqutl and a peculiar nervousness
about its own premise. Having set out to show
how stern-but-fair Vlad becomes the monstrous
Dracula, the film cops out in a coda that connects
with no known version of the story, presenting
Evans as an eternal romantic who so far as we
know hasn’t bitten anyone innocent, while
Dance’s nameless fiend, stalking in his footsteps,
seems more like Stoker’s Dracula. A weakness of
Coppola’s film was that in rethinking Dracula
as a great romantic, it reduced his stature as a
monster. But in Dracula Untoldht’s not even a
tragically flawed good guy. Backstory doesn’t
necessarily make for stronger characterisation,
and the outcome here isn’t the untold story
of any of the Draculas worthy of the name
- Bram Stoker’s, Bela Lugosi’s, Christopher
Lee’s, Klaus Kinski’s, even Udo Kier’s - but the
all too familiar story of someone we’ve never
met before and are unlikely to see again. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Mervyn Moore
Dentsu Inc./
Cast
Brother Lucian
Michael De Luca
Costume Designer
Fuji Television
Luke Evans
William Houston
Screenplay
Ngila Dickson
Network, Inc.
Vlad III, Prince of
Cazan
Matt Sazama
With the partial
Wallachia, Dracula
Noah Huntley
Burk Sharpless
©Universal
assistance of the
Sarah Gadon
Captain Petru
Director of
Studios and
European Regional
Mirena
RonanVibert
Photography
Legendary Pictures
Development Fund
Dominic Cooper
Simion
John Schwartzman
Productions, LLC
through Northern
Sultan Mehmed II
Zach McGowan
Edited by
Production
Ireland Screen
Art Parkinson
Shkelgim
Richard Pearson
Companies
Quebec - Production
Ingeras
Ferdinand Kingsley
Production Designer
Universal Pictures and
Services Tax Credit
Charles Dance
Hamza Bey
FrangoisAudouy
Legendary Pictures
Executive Producers
Master Vampire
Music
present a Michael
Alissa Phillips
Diarmaid Murtagh
Dolby Digital/
Ramin Djawadi
De Luca production
Joe CaraccioloJr
Dimitru
Datasat
Production
Presented in
Thomas Tull
Paul Kaye
In Colour
Sound Mixer
association with
JonJashni
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Universal Pictures
International
UK & Eire
Transylvania, 1462. Sultan Mehmed II demands that
Prince Vlad turn over a thousand boys - including his
own son Ingeras - to be raised as Janissaries, to fight
for the Ottoman Empire. Having been a hostage in his
childhood, Vlad has promised his wife Mirena that he will
not let Ingeras suffer as he did. Realising that he hasn’t
the military resources to fight the sultan, Vlad ventures
to a mountain cave and drinks the blood of a vampire who
lives there, gaining all the powers of a vampire for three
days, with the possibility of reverting to human status if
he refrains from drinking human blood. As a shapeshifting
monster, Vlad defeats Mehmed’s first army, then retreats
to a monastery with his family and retainers. When
Mirena is mortally wounded, Vlad drinks her blood and
becomes a full vampire - then defeats and kills Mehmed.
Taking the name Dracula, he lives to the present day
and encounters Mina, a woman who looks like Mirena.
The vampire of the mountain cave has also survived.
Reviewed by Matthew Taylor
Belgian director Michael R. Roskam made
an auspicious debut with 201 1’s Bullhead, a
stark drama that juggled macro and micro in
combining the narrative density of a complex
crime saga with the precision focus of an intimate
character study. This stateside follow-up finds
him collaborating with author Dennis Lehane,
adapting his own short story ‘Animal Rescue’ for
another underworld tale of past transgressions
returning to impact on the present. On paper,
it seems a shrewd meeting of minds - it’s
not difficult to imagine Lehane approving of
Bullheads fatalistic, occasionally melodramatic
take on the return of the repressed - so it’s
frustrating that The Drop only sporadically comes
to life, despite its atmospheric rendering of a
distinctly unfashionable corner of Brooklyn
(replacing the source material’s familiar Boston
turf) and the low-rung players who people it.
As with Ben Affleck’s adaptation of Lehane’s
Gone Baby Gone (2007), we get the initial lowdown
on a tight-knit neighbourhood through brisk
montage and voiceover narration, as bartender
Bob Saginowski (Tom Hardy) explains the
logistics of the borough’s Mob-controlled
‘drop’ bars - unassuming joints where dirty
money is laundered. Much as he did with the
rural black market of Flanders in Bullhead,
Roskam establishes this earthy milieu with deft
economy. The Brooklyn depicted here appears
conspicuously untouched by gentrification,
although the parish church is being sold off
to developers (for “condos with stained-glass
windows”). Denizens such as Marv (James
Gandolfini) are, however, acutely aware of their
onrushing obsolescence (“We’re dead already...
just still walking around”). A onetime big deal,
Marv is now under the thumb of the local
Chechen mob; his reckless hubris worries the
loyal, dependable Bob and eventually leads to
arranging to have his own bar robbed on drop
night - a rash moneymaking scheme that quickly
goes awry (a similar plotline featured in Andrew
Dominik’s recession-clouded Killing Them Softly,
in which Gandolfini had a memorably dyspeptic
cameo). In his final screen appearance, the late
actor does strong work as this corroded has-been,
railing against his relegation (“At least I used to
have something. I was respected. I wds feared’).
Bob, meanwhile, is notionally a placid loner
who’s possibly mildly autistic - a diagnosis
supported by both Lehane’s script and Hardy’s
studied performance. His chance discovery
of an abandoned, brutalised pit-bull puppy
and the hesitant bonding that ensues with
a wary neighbour (an underused Noomi
Rapace) give the impression of a sentimental
diversion (the awkward meet-cute over
a dustbin could belong to another film
altogether). But the pooch doubles as both a
macguffin that will set disparate characters
on collision courses and as a symbol of Bob’s
own wayward past - and teeth-baring future.
The film’s downbeat, subdued tenor suggests
that Roskam’s aesthetic touchstones might be
i970S-era Sidney Lumet or Bob Rafelson; there’s
also a hint of Jerry Schatzberg in the way that
scenes are allowed to breathe deeply and
halting conversations are lingered over. It’s
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 69
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Fury
USA 2014
Director: David Ayer
Certificate 15 134m 27s
© heartening to witness a gangland thriller
free of bombast, but too often there’s a
listless quality to the action, and moments that
should be charged feel static and leaden. A few
tete-a-tetes between Bob and a volatile local
ne’er-do-well (another charismatic appearance
from Bullheads Matthias Schoenaerts) bristle
with menace, but other scenes are left to simmer
too long; in being opened out, the slight story
can turn baggy. Overall, it’s a minor, albeit
flavoursome entry in the Lehane canon. For
Roskam, you sense the greater work lies ahead. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
production
Michael Esper
Peter Chernin
Made in association
Rardy
Jenno Topping
with TSG
Screenplay
Entertainment and
Dolby Digital/
Dennis Lehane
Ingenious Media
Datasat
Based upon his short
Produced in
In Colour
story Animal Rescue
association with Big
Prints by
Director of
Screen Productions
DeLuxe
Photography
With the support
[2.35:1]
Nicolas Karakatsanis
of the New York
Edited by
State Governor’s
Distributor
Christopher Tellefsen
Office for Motion
20th Century Fox
Production
Picture & Television
International (UK)
Designer
Development
Therese DePrez
Executive
Music
Producers
Marco Beltrami
Mike Larocca
Sound Mixer
M. Blair Breard
Justin Gray
Dennis Lehane
Costume Designer
Film Extracts
David Robinson
©Twentieth
Century Fox Film
Cry of the City
(1948)
Corporation and
Cast
TSG Entertainment
Tom Hardy
Finance LLC(inall
Bob Saginowski
territories except
Noomi Rapace
Brazil, Italyjapan,
Nadia
Korea and Spain)
James Gandolfini
©TCF Hungary Film
Cousin Marv
Rights Exploitation
Matthias
Limited Liability
Schoenaerts
Company, Twentieth
Eric Deeds
Century Fox Film
John Drtiz
Corporation and
Detective Torres
TSG Entertainment
Ann Dowd
Finance LLC(in
Dottie
Brazil, Italyjapan,
Michael Aronov
Korea and Spain)
Chovka
Production
James Frecheville
Companies
Fitz
Fox Searchlight
Elizabeth Rodriguez
Pictures presents
Detective Romsey
a Chernin
Tobias Segal
Entertainment
Briele
Brooklyn, present day. Bob Saginowski is bartender
at his cousin Marv’s bar, which is used by the
Chechen mob to launder cash. Bob finds a brutalised,
abandoned puppy in a dustbin; a neighbour, Nadia,
persuades him to keep it. Unknown to Bob, Marv
arranges for the bar to be robbed. However, the
men hired leave a trail, and Marv and Bob later
find the money returned to the bar accompanied
by a dismembered arm. Panicked, Marv finds and
kills the surviving thief. Despite this, the Chechens
entrust Marv with a lucrative cash drop scheduled
for Super Bowl weekend. Bob is harassed by Eric
Deeds, an ex-con who claims responsibility for an
unsolved neighbourhood murder. Insisting that he
owns the dog. Deeds demands that Bob pay him
$10,000 for it. Nadia reveals that she and Deeds
once dated. Marv proposes that Deeds rob the bar
on Super Bowl night. Deeds forces Nadia along with
him. Marv is executed by the Chechens. Ignoring
Bob’s offer to pay for the dog. Deeds demands the
cash in the safe instead. Bob, revealing that he
committed the unsolved murder on behalf of Marv,
shoots Deeds dead. The Chechens take over Marv’s
bar but let Bob stay. Bob reconciles with Nadia.
The iron giant: Brad Pitt
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
The Mq Sherman was the workhorse tank of
American forces in World War II, though it had
practical design flaws that placed it at a distinct
disadvantage to the German Tiger I - not least
of these was a frontal armour plate that could be
punctured by a well-placed incendiary round,
cooking the entire crew alive. If seeing this sort
of arms-and-armour marginalia in a practical
context interests you - and it does me - well
then Fury might just be the movie for you.
“Wait until you see it, what a man can do to
another man.” This is battle-scarred veteran
Grady ‘Coon-Ass' Travis (Jon Bemthal), talking
to tyro Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman). Ellison
has been yanked out of the typing pool and
subbed into the crew of the tank ‘Fury’, who’ve
been together since the North African campaign.
That “wait until you see it” is a threat, but it’s
also a promise from writer/director David Ayer,
whose recounting of the beginning of the end
of the war on the European front fairly wades
through viscera. Shortly after hearing this,
Ellison has to pick up a chunk of human face
that had belonged to his predecessor, including
a coldly staring eye. In the two-plus hours that
follow, we’ll see field hospitals and meat wagons,
limbs clipped off by machine-gun fire, a man
on fire who summons the presence of mind to
blow his brains out, a corpse flattened by tank
treads until barely recognisable as human, and
other vignettes too numerous to mention.
Squeamish and untested, Ellison is our point
of entry into this world. He - and by association
we - will be shown the ropes by Sergeant Don
Wardaddy’ Collier, played by Brad Pitt. Because
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Andrew Menzies
presents in
Bill Block
Music
association with
David Ayer
Steven Price
QED International
Ethan Smith
Production
and LStar Capital a
John Lesher
Sound Mixer
QED International,
Written by
Lisa Pinero
Le Grisbi, Crave
David Ayer
Costume Designer
Films production
Director of
Owen Thornton
A film by David Ayer
Photography
Executive Producers
Roman Vasyanov
©Norman
Brad Pitt
Film Editors
Licensing, LLC
Sasha Shapiro
Dody Dorn
Production
Anton Lessine
Jay Cassidy
Companies
Alex Ott
Production Designer
Columbia Pictures
BenWaisbren
Cast
Captain Waggoner
Emma
Brad Pitt
Brad William Henke
Don ‘Wardaddy’
Sergeant Davis
Dolby Digital/
Collier
Jim Parrack
Datasat
Shia LaBeouf
Sergeant Binkowski
In Colour
Boyd ‘Bible’ Swan
Xavier Samuel
[2.35:1]
Logan Lerman
Lieutenant Parker
Norman Ellison
Scott Eastwood
Distributor
Michael Pena
Sergeant Miles
Sony Pictures
Trini ‘Gordo’ Garcia
Kevin Vance
Releasing
Jon Bernthal
Sergeant Peterson
Grady ‘Coon-Ass’
Anamaria Marinca
Travis
Irma
Jason Isaacs
Alicia von Rittberg
Germany, 1945. The crew of Sherman tank ‘Fury’ - Don
‘Wardaddy’ Collier, Boyd Swan, ‘Gordo’ Garcia and Grady
Travis - return to camp having lost one of their own
in battle. They acquire a new crew member, Norman
Ellison, who has no combat experience. During his first
mission with Fury, Ellison hesitates to fire in combat,
so Collier forces him to kill a prisoner. Ellison performs
better on their next mission, clearing a German
village, so afterwards Collier takes him for a romantic
interlude with two village women. Ellison becomes
smitten with the younger, who is killed by incoming
artillery immediately after their tryst. Fury and its
crew join a detachment of tanks to hold a crossroads
and defend an American encampment. Arriving at the
crossroads. Fury is disabled by a landmine. Ellison,
scouting ahead, sights an SS division advancing
towards them. Collier convinces his crew to stay and
hold the crossroads. They do so, inflicting devastating
losses on the enemy as they are picked off one by
one. Finally, alone, Ellison slithers through an escape
hatch and buries himself in the mud. The following
day, he is discovered by advancing American forces.
70 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Giovanni’s isiand
Japan 2014
Director: Nishikubo Mizuho
of Pitt’s involvement, Fury inevitably faces
comparison with Quentin Tarantino’s trifling
Inglourious Basterds{2oog), though I was also
reminded of Pitt’s abusive patriarch in Terrence
Malick’s The Tree ofLife(20i i). Ayer is more
concerned with the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of
combat than Tarantino, but is every bit as aware
of his cinematic precedents. The opening of
the film, which has Collier using his field knife
to dispatch a German as he crosses a rutted no
man’s land of mud, recalls the beginning of Sam
Fuller’s The Big Red One(igSo). The blowout
set piece that concludes Fury draws from the
same material that Tarantino parodied in his
propaganda-film-within-a-film: the one-man-
army stand of decorated soldier-turned-actor
Audie Murphy, dramatised in the 1955 movie of
his autobiography To Hell and Back. And then Ayer
is forever standing in the shadow of Peckinpah,
whose The Wild Bunch (1969) he was once
slated to remake, and whose scenes of ensemble
horseplay he has clearly studied at length.
Here the Peckinpah influence isn’t in the
battlefield material, which is designed for
tactical crispness and real-time urgency rather
than the slo-mo Sturm und Drang that typifies
Bloody Sam’s Cross of Iron (1977). Rather, it’s most
present in the film’s lone chamber-drama set
piece: having occupied a German village, Gollier
and Ellison bust in on two Frauleins in their
flat. Collier coerces Ellison into sleeping with
the younger of the two - she goes along with
this, hesitantly but consensually, in as much
as consent can exist with the threat of force
hanging in the air, and finally enthusiastically.
The post-coital glow is dimmed, however,
when the rest of the crew barge in looking for
their turn, leading to an embittered dinner-
table standoff that wobbles on the precipice of
open violence for an agonisingly long time.
In its vacillation between menace and
tenderness, its air of desire under fire, this scene
treads some of the same treacherous territory
as the is-it-isn’t-it attempted rape of Isela Vega
by Kris Kristofferson in Peckinpah’s Bring Me
the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974). It is thus totally
un-PC, as is the contradiction at the heart of
Fury, which the movie doesn’t seek to resolve so
much as exemplify - that war is horrible, and
it is also majestic, and if it’s going to happen
anyway it might as well be done well. (“Do
your job,” or some variation thereof, is repeated
throughout the film like a mantra.) The battle
scenes, from first skirmish to Ragnarok finale,
are done with queasy exhilaration, terrible
lucidity and an almost worshipful reverence for
the earth-shaking power of heavy ordnance.
I’ve never been fully convinced by an Ayer
film before, in part because of his susceptibility to
gruff sentimentality, which still threatens in Fury
whenever there’s a lull in the firing. But his latest
is something different. Ayer, who served in a US
Navy submarine before turning to screenwriting,
has a rare feel for the symbiotic relationship that
a tight-knit crew have with one another and with
their vehicle. When the crew are in a hot spot,
they jam together like a five-piece band sharpened
by years on the road. In the heat of battle, Ayer
locates a frantic rhythm and musicality - and
he lets his heroes go down swinging. ©
Reviewed Andrew Osmond
Cartoon films have been making audiences cry
since the earliest Disney features, and Japan’s
Giovanni’s Islandis a first-class weepy. In part this
is because it’s not a weepy: its tearful tragedy
rides on a compelling story and a recognition that
its child protagonists are only sharing in wider
human sorrows, which other people have lived
through and still endure. The setting is Shikotan, a
northern Japanese island, at the time of World War
II. After Japan’s surrender, Shikotan is occupied
by Russian forces, as shown through the eyes of
two pre-teen brothers. In the tensest scene, the
invading Soviets burst into the boys’ school and
the terrified teacher tries to prevent hysteria by
carrying on with the class, even at gunpoint.
Directed by Nishikubo Mizuho (real name
Nishikubo Toshihiko) and animated by the
Production LG studio, Giovanni’s IslandmdiY
be a ‘real world’ drama, but it is lightened both
by the cartoon medium and by a particular
narrative contrivance. The kids feel nearer to
Charlie Brown than A/dra- they’re drawn with
simple, loose lines, sometimes with cartoony
distortions (for example when they wolf down
their food). As usual with Japanese cartoons,
the backgrounds are more detailed than the
characters but still have a graphics-led edge. There
are distorted perspectives, flattened picture-book
scenery and pencil lines ingrained in the wood
interiors where much of the film takes place.
The film introduces a fantasy element through
the boys’ love of the story Night on the Galactic
Railroad This is a real book, famous in Japan,
about a train journey through space in search of
‘the true heaven’. It was written by a Buddhist,
Miyazawa Kenji, though it has prominent
Christian imagery of giant heavenly crosses, and
it became an outstanding anime film in 1985.
In Giovanni’s Island, the boys and their father
adore the book, quoting it at key points. The
boys’ names are based on the book’s characters
- the older brother Junpei corresponds to
Giovanni in the book (hence the film’s title),
and Kanta to his friend Campanella. Naturally,
the animation takes the opportunity to plunge
the boys into their dreams, riding or chasing the
1 Credits and Synopsis
Producers
50th anniversary
llyushenko Polina
MiyagawaTomoyuki
project
Tanya
Sakurai Yoshiki
In association with
Kitajima Saburo
Screenplay
Nihon Eiga Satellite
Genzo
Sugita Shigemichi
Broadcasting
Inuzuka Hiroshi
Sakurai Yoshiki
Corporation Film Inc.
village chief
Original Story
Produced by Japan
Yachigusa Kaoru
Sugita Shigemichi
Association of
older Sawako
Compositing
Music Enterprises
NakadaiTatsuya
Director
Executive Producer
older Junpei
NakataYumiko
Ishikawa Mitsuhisa
Editor
In Colour
UematsuJunichi
[1.78:1]
General Art Director
Voice Cast
Subtitles
Santiago Montiel
Ichimura Masachika
Sound Director
Tatsuo
Distributor
Fujiyama Fusanobu
NakamaYukie
All the Anime
Lead Animation
Sawako
Supervisor
Yanagihara Kanako
Japanese
Ito Nobutake
Micchan
theatrical title
SantamariaYusuke
Giovanni no Shima
©JAME
Hideo
Production
Yokoyama Kota
Companies
Junpei
A Japan Association
TaniaiJunya
of Music Enterprises
Kanta
Shored up: Giovanni's Island
space train through luminous galaxies in brief
but lyrical interludes; in a lovely sequence, the
brothers’ play with a toy train becomes a celestial
light show. The later heartbreaking scenes,
criticised in some quarters, imbue death with
children’s fantasy, which feels justly in keeping
with how the whole film is constructed.
Giovanni’s Islandis exceptionally sad for a
cartoon film, if not as devastating as Bar foot
Gen (1983) or Grave of the Fireflies (igSS), two
other Japanese animations about World War
II. In Fireflies, the boy protagonist was shown
making fatal mistakes in matters of survival.
The same could be said of Giovanni’s Island,
where the boys embark on a reckless journey
through a frozen Russian landscape. Ultimately,
though, the film suggests that there are some
mistakes a person cannot bear avoiding, when
it comes to seeing a loved one for the last time.
As with Miyazaki Hayao’s The Wind Rises
(201 3), the film maybe accused of a covert
political agenda. Russia’s takeover of Shikotan
and its neighbouring islands is still a matter of
dispute in Japan; the film might also be seen as
commenting indirectly on Japan’s territorial
disputes with China. Regardless, Giovanni’s
Islandis excellent on its own terms, one of a
growing number of recent Japanese cartoon
films to honour the legacy of Studio Ghibli. ©
Shikotan, a small Japanese island, 1945. Young Junpei
and his little brother Kanta hear on the radio that
Japan has surrendered to the Allies. Soon afterwards,
Russian soldiers occupy Shikotan with their families.
Junpei befriends Tanya, the daughter of a Russian
commander. Tatsuo, the boys’ widowed father, smuggles
rice to help the Japanese islanders. When he’s arrested,
Junpei mistakenly blames Tanya for betraying him,
though in factTatsuo’s brother Hideo was responsible.
In 1947, the Soviets ship the Japanese islanders
to Russian internment camps. Kanta falls sick,
but when he hears that Tatsuo is not far away,
he insists on seeing him. Sneaking out of their
camp, the boys make a perilous journey through
the freezing landscape. They have an emotional
reunion with Tatsuo, separated by barbed wire, but
they’re arrested. Kanta dies soon afterwards, and
Junpei is shipped to the Japanese mainland.
Fifty years later, Junpei visits Kanta and Tatsuo’s
family grave on the now Russian island. He learns
that Tanya has died, but meets her daughter and
granddaughter.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 71
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Going Away
France 2013
Director: Nicole Garcia
Certificate 12A 95m 9s
Reviewed by Ginette Vincendeau
Spoiler alert: this review reveals a plot twist
A respected stage and film actress in France
since the 1970s, Nicole Garcia has also built a
solid reputation as a director with now seven
features, including Place Venddme (iggS, with
Catherine Deneuve) and The Adversary (2002,
with Daniel Auteuil). She works predominantly
within the classical, intimate family melodrama
familiar in French cinema from the features of
Claude Sautet, Andre Techine, Claude Miller
and more recently Olivier Assayas and Mia
Hansen-L0ve, who contain the traumas and
conflicts that erupt in families and couples
within the confines of elegantly understated
filmmaking: raw emotions in nice surroundings,
with classy performances. In many respects.
Going Away continues this tradition.
The film, set in an unspecified location in the
south of France, presents us with Baptiste (Pierre
Rochefort), a young supply teacher who, having
reached the end of his contract, surprises the head
by turning down without explanation the offer of
an extension. Similarly unexplained is the darkly
shot opening scene showing a group of people
being violently evicted; only much later are we
able to piece the puzzle together and guess that
this was Baptiste being thrown out of a squat.
Though he refuses to put down roots, Baptiste
is sufficiently concerned to take in one of his
pupils, Mathias (Mathias Brezot), left stranded
for the weekend by his estranged parents’ lack of
planning. The boy introduces him to his mother
Sandra (Louise Bourgoin) in the seaside cafe
where she works as a waitress. Sceptical at first,
she warms to the sensitive (and good-looking)
Baptiste. Going Away then unfolds in a series of
quiet, allusive scenes - through which we pick up
the fact that Baptiste’s aloof demeanour hides a
troubled personality reliant on strong medication,
and that Sandra, in debt to the tune of €50,000, is
threatened with reprisals if she doesn’t pay it back.
While it doesn’t entirely avoid longueurs, this part
of the film is subtle in its evocation of Baptiste and
Sandra’s budding relationship and the part played
in it by Mathias, and original in its depiction of
the modest milieu that mother and son inhabit.
Going Away switches gear with Baptiste’s
decision to take Sandra and her son to visit his
family, who live nearby. It turns out that home is
a chateau, and we are abruptly plunged into the
more stereotypical - though more fun - world of
the grand-bourgeois melodrama. Baptiste’s family
is gathered for Whitsun, enabling us to witness
the rituals of the rich: crayfish, consomme, tennis
and swimming pool against the background of
the exquisite domain, complete with servants.
Baptiste’s father is dead and the family is
now ruled by matriarch Liliane, played with
magnificent hauteur by Dominique Sanda (who
first came to notice in Robert Bresson’s A Gentle
Womanin 1969). While Liliane and Baptiste’s
sister Emmanuelle (Deborah Frangois) have
some complexity as characters, his two brothers
are caricatures, obsessed with rank and money.
The fairly lurid events that are now revealed,
in part through flashback - Baptiste’s dropping
out of brilliant university studies, his breakdown
and incarceration, his fight with his father and
his estrangement from the family - would not be
Debt-a-tete: Louise Bourgoin, Mathias Brezot
out of place in a soap opera. As a result, Baptiste’s
emergence as a pure spirit, nobly detached from
material contingencies and opposed to his crassly
snobbish family, seems facile, and his decision
to turn down his inheritance, apart from the
€50,000 for Sandra, a trifle unbelievable. The
extravagant gap between Baptiste’s super-rich
family and Sandra’s world of scrambling to make
ends meet inhibits any real social critique - even
allowing for the implausibility of a supply
teacher taking a pupil in for the weekend.
Going Away, like so many intimate French
melodramas, relies for its appeal on its cast.
Louise Bourgoin as Sandra is cast against type but
performs with her customary aplomb. Starting
as a comic weather announcer on the television
channel Canal+, she has often been cast in comic
and/or sexy parts, as in The Girl from Monaco
(2008) and The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele
Blanc-Sec (2010). Going Away deliberately mutes
her stunning looks by dying her hair dull brown
and dressing her down, but she loses none of her
appeal. In the central role (and his first major
film part), Pierre Rochefort is quietly excellent,
though it is difficult to abstract his performance
from the fact that he is the son of the director
(and his father is the renowned actor Jean
Rochefort). This could be seen in two ways. On
the one hand it confirms the ever-expanding hold
of nepotism in contemporary French cinema.
On the other, it adds piquancy to the figure of
the mother in the film. As played by Sanda,
she is attractive, formidable and unforgiving
all at once. Family tensions are universal, but
this added twist to an old story makes the film
arguably a metaphor for the difficulties of a
young man trying to assert himself against
parents who have talent, status and money. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
with France 3
Cambiere
Philippe Martin
Cinema, Pauline’s
Eric Ruf
Screenplay
Angel, Appaloosa
Gilles Cambiere
Jacques Fieschi
Distribution
Benjamin Lavernhe
Nicole Garcia
with the participation
Thomas Cambiere
Director of
of Canal -i-,0CS
Jean-Pierre Martins
Photography
in association with
Balou
Pierre Milon
Cofinova 9, Hoche
Olivier Loustau
Editing
Images, Soficinema9
Mathias’ father
Simon Jacquet
with the participation
Mathias Brezot
Production Designer
of France Televisions
Mathias
Veronique Barneoud
with the support of La
Original Music
Region Languedoc-
Dolby Digital
Composed,
Roussillon, La Region
In Colour
Arranged and
Midi-Pyrenees
[1.85:1]
Performed by
in partnership
Subtitles
Eric Neveux
withCNC
Sound
in association
Distributor
Jean-Pierre Duret
with Wild Bunch
Studiocanal Limited
Benoit Hillebrant
Afilm by Nicole Garcia
Jean-Pierre Laforce
Developed with the
French theatrical title
Costume Designer
support of Cofinova
Un beau dimanche
Nathalie Du Roscoat
Development 4
©LFRLes Films
Pelleas, France 3
Cast
Cinema, Pauline’s
Louise Bourgoin
Angel, Appaloosa
Sandra
Distribution
Pierre Rochefort
Production
Baptiste Cambiere
Companies
Dominique Sanda
Les Films Pelleas
Liliane Cambiere
presents in
Deborah Frangois
co-production
Emmanuelle
South of France, the present. Baptiste, a young
supply teacher, is coming to the end of his contract
at a primary school. Despite the offer of extended
employment, he decides to move on. However, he
notices that one of his pupils, Mathias, has been left
alone for the weekend due to a misunderstanding
between his estranged parents. Baptiste takes
Mathias to his mother, Sandra, who works at a seaside
cafe, and the three begin a hesitant friendship. On
a night out, Sandra encourages Baptiste to drink,
against his will; she discovers that this makes him
ill because he is on strong medication. Sandra
is pursued by two men demanding the €50,000
they lent her for a (failed) restaurant venture.
Baptiste takes Sandra and Mathias, unannounced,
to his parents’ nearby estate while a family reunion
is in full swing. We learn that, rejected for his lack of
ambition by a wealthy and status-conscious family, he
suffered a breakdown and incarceration in a mental
institution. In flashback, we see his father trying
to prevent him living as a vagrant after leaving the
institution, and his sister Emmanuelle watching in
horror as the two come to violent blows. Baptiste’s
mother and brothers make no attempt to conceal
their contempt for the lower-class Sandra. When his
brothers offer him €50,000 as an advance on his
inheritance, he takes it, rejecting the rest, and leaves
with Sandra, with whom he is in love, and Mathias.
72 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
The Great Museum
Austria 2014
Director: Johannes Holzhausen
Certificate PG 94m 20s
Haider
Director: Vishal Bhardwaj
Certificate 15 159m 34s
Reviewed Catherine Wheatley
A quite delightful pair of images opens The Great
Museum, Johannes Holzhausen’s documentary
study of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
On a broad marble staircase, a cleaner tickles
the testes of Canova’s statue of Theseus with
a tiny dusting brush, readying him for his
public. In another room, the smooth plains of
a parquet floor splinter and rend as a pickaxe
smashes into them. In different ways, the two
scenes seem to announce an irreverent expose
that will tear away the glossy veneer of a well-
loved institution. In fact, we’re given quite the
opposite: a film so in thrall to its subject matter
that it might as well be a corporate video. Like
the museum itself, it is polished, elegant, rarefied
and rather alienating, especially for viewers
with little or no knowledge of art history.
Shot between 2012 and 2013 during the
renovation of the museum’s celebrated
Kunstkammer Wien galleries, Holzhausen’s
behind-the-scenes study borrows thematically
and stylistically from the work of Frederick
Wiseman (whose National Gallery premiered
at Cannes this year). There’s no voiceover,
no talking heads, no captions or interviews.
Even the artworks are unnamed. Instead
we are gently guided from board meeting
to conservation workshop, auction room
to archive, with Holzhausen’s camera
following at a respectful distance.
In one standout sequence he traces the path
of a young employee riding a push scooter
over hardwood floors on a clerical errand, the
camera presumably perched behind on a similar
vehicle. Otherwise the film’s most interesting
scenes focus on the processes of presentation and
maintenance. A Dutch conservator discovers that
a Rubens has been painted over several times,
for example, while a pair of stiff-faced curators
bicker over the best configuration for the new
gallery. Insects are picked from canvases; the
joint is combed for moths. Everything is just so,
like those high-class holiday resorts where every
morning the sand is sieved before breakfast.
A trained art historian, Holzhausen describes
himself in the press notes as “a fallen peer” of
the museum’s senior staff. Watching the film,
one gets the sense that he is part of an in-crowd.
He isn’t above poking fond fun at his subjects
- most effectively during a board meeting
where a passive-aggressive debate over a choice
of font breaks out - but on the whole there’s
little sense of challenge. It’s a far cry from Jem
1 Credits and Synopsis
Producer
Companies
Dolby Digital
Johannes
A Navigator Film
In Colour
Rosenberger
production
[1.78:1]
Written by
Made with the
Subtitles
Johannes Holzhausen
support of
Constantin Wulff
Osterreichisches
Distributor
Photography
FilminstitutORF
Matchbox Films
Joerg Burger
(Film-/Fernseh-
Attila Boa
Abkommen),
Austrian
Editor
Filmstandort Austria,
theatrical title
Dieter Pichler
FilmfondsWien
Das grosse Museum
Sound
Project Development
Andreas Pils
funding by
Andreas Hamza
FilmfondsWien,
Osterreichisches
©Navigator Film
Filminstitut
Production
Ribbit exhibit: The Great Museum
Cohen’s lyrical Museum Hours (2012), which
viewed the same gallery through a security
guard’s eyes and lingered on the detritus and dust
that gathered in corners. Here, the museum’s
status as national icon is repeatedly stressed:
in the crane shots emphasising the building’s
majesty; the recurring image of Maria Theresa;
the donation of an imperial uniform; the visit by
Federal President Heinz Fischer. The Hapsburg
legacy hovers over all we see. The marketing
people know that for many this is the museum’s
great appeal, hence their decision to rename
the affiliated treasury the Imperial Treasury.
The one chink in the gallery’s metaphorical
armour shows up in the form of a plucky member
of the museum’s ‘guest services team’ (read
floor staff), who summons the courage during
a brand-awareness exercise to tell her bosses
that she and her colleagues feel undervalued,
sidelined: after 1 1 years at the museum, she
says sadly, she has never met anyone from
another department. It’s an intriguing moment
but Holzhausen swiftly dispatches it and the
employee disappears from view, resurfacing
only briefly in the film’s final moments. I would
have liked her to have been named, but while the
likes of gallery director Sabine Haag and chief
financial officer Paul Frey have their names in
lights, Holzhausen’s film leaves her uncredited. ©
A documentary taking a behind-the-scenes iook at
the running of Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum.
Shot between 2012 and 2013 during the renovation
of the museum’s Kunstkammer Wien gaiieries, the
fiim opens as the oid gaiieries are stripped down
and cioses with the iaunch party for the new exhibit.
The museum uses the Kunstkammer opening as an
opportunity to take stock and rebrand, a decision
that affects everyone from the management team
to the fioor staff. As weii as offering giimpses of
the day-to-day routine at the museum, the fiim
aiso takes in more significant occasions such as
a visit from Federai President Heinz Fischer and
the retirement of a iong-serving staff member.
Reviewed by Naman Ramachandran
The annals of Indian cinema are littered with
Shakespeare adaptations, given the universal
themes of much of his work. Ham/et has had
several Indian outings, including K.B. Athavale’s
Khoon-E-Nahak(ig2S), Sohrab Modi’s Khoon
Ka Khoon (1935) and Kishore Sahu’s Hamlet
(1954). Haider, the latest Indian adaptation, is
director Vishal Bhardwaj’s third venture into
Bard territory after Maqbool (Macbeth, 2003) and
Omkara (Othello, 2006). Bhardwaj set Maqbool
in the Mumbai mafia milieu and Omkara in
the badlands of northern India; for Haider, he
relocates the Prince of Denmark to Kashmir, a
paradise on earth over which India and Pakistan
have fought three wars since 1947, with both
countries controlling two significant chunks of
the region and China a third. After a period of
relative peace, when Indian films were regularly
shot there, Kashmir flared up again in the late
1980s, with some groups demanding accession to
Pakistan and others an independent state, leading
to a strong army presence in the vale. Haideris
set during the height of those troubles, in 1995.
Bhardwaj and his co-writer Basharat Peer,
a well-known commentator on Kashmir,
substitute Pakistan for Norway: Hamlet’s father
is now a doctor; Gertrude is a teacher; Claudius
is a politician; and in a delicious reimagining
echoing the heyday of Bollywood in the valley,
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are video library
managers who constantly ape the star Salman
Khan. Hamlet (Haider) himself is now a student,
studying the revolutionary poets of British India.
Searching for his father, who was taken away
by the Indian army and has joined the rank’s
of the disappeared, Haider finds himself thrust
into the harsh reality of life for the common
Kashmiri. Of all the versions of Hamlet, Bhardwaj’s
interpretation is closest in spirit to Grigory
Kozintsev’s 1964 adaptation, with Kashmir
replacing post-Stalinist Russia. Bhardwaj and
Peer take their time setting the political context
but once that environment is established the
human drama is brought to the forefront, while
the politics simmers in the background.
Unlike the austere beauty of Kozintsev’s
Slings and arrows: Shahid Kapoor, Tabu
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 73
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Hockney
United Kingdom/USA 2014
Director: Randall Wright
Certificate 15 112m 26s
O monochrome frames, Haiderhwcsts
with colour and vitality, throwing the
travails of Kashmir into sharp relief. That
Bhardwaj has managed to achieve this despite
the indignity of his film receiving 41 cuts from
the Indian censors (including the removal of
shots of genital torture and severed body parts)
is commendable indeed. Shahid Kapoor, whom
Bhardwaj lifted out of Bollywood song-and-dance
purgatory with the thriller Kaminej; (2009), does
a credible job as Haider but pales next to Tabu, a
dominant presence as his mother Ghazala, whose
performance is reminiscent of her terrific Nimmi/
Lady Macbeth in Maqbool Despite this, Haider
is a powerful look at one of the most troubled
regions of the world, and a highly effective
retelling of Hamlet thaX works all the better for
not sticking slavishly to Shakespeare’s text. It can
take its rightful place alongside Harud (2010) by
Aamir Bashir, seen here as Liyaqat/Laertes, as one
of the best films on the Kashmir situation. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Producers
in association with
Rajat Bhagat
Siddharth Roy Kapur
Vishal Bhardwaj
Salman and
Vishal Bhardwaj
Pictures presents a
Salman, courtiers
Written by
Vishal Bhardwaj film
Vishal Bhardwaj
in Coiour
Basharat Peer
Cast
[2.35:1]
Based on Hamlet by
Subtities
William Shakespeare
Shahid Kapoor
Director of
Haider
Distributor
Photography
Shraddha Kapoor
IG Interactive
Pankaj Kumar
Arshia Lone
Entertainment
Editor
Tabu
Aarif Sheikh
Ghazala
Production
Kay Kay Menon
Designers
Khurram
Subrata Chakraborty
Irrfan Khan
Am it Ray
Roohdar
Music
NarendraJha
Vishal Bhardwaj
Dr Hilal Meer
Sound
Kuibhushan
Shajith Koyeri
Kharbanda
Costume Designer
Hussain Mir
Dolly Ahluwalia
Laiit Parimoo
Choreographer
Pervez Lone
Sudesh Adhana
AashishVidyarthi
Brigadier IS. Murthy
Production
Aamir Bashir
Companies
Liyaqat
UTV Motion Pictures
Sumit Kaul
Kashmir, India, 1995. The Indian army arrests Dr Hilal
Meer for treating a wanted militant and he becomes
another of the many disappeared Kashmiri men.
Hilal’s son Haider returns from university. He sees
his uncle Khurram,an influential politician, flirting
with his mother Ghazala, and storms off. With the
help of his friends Salman and Salman and his
girlfriend Arshia, who is the daughter of local police
superintendent Pervez, Haider sets about looking for
his father. Roohdar tells Haider that he was Hilal’s
cellmate in an army prison. Hilal, now dead, told
Roohdar it was Khurram who betrayed him; he wants
Haider to avenge his death and Khurram’s affair
with Ghazala. Pervez informs Haider that Roohdar
is a Pakistani agent who has told him a false story
to implicate Khurram. Confused, Haider becomes
unstable. Khurram and Ghazala marry; after the
wedding, Haider stages a puppet show that suggests
their guilt. Haider is committed to an asylum but he
escapes. He calls Ghazala and she convinces him to
meet her. Pervez arrives and in the confusion Haider
shoots him dead. Hiding in a graveyard, Haider is
shocked to witness the funeral of Arshia, who has
committed suicide. Ghazala and Khurram arrive with
the army. A shootout ensues and Haider is wounded.
Ghazala blows herself up and Khurram loses his legs.
Khurram begs Haider to kill him but Haider leaves.
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
Anyone who could wander the streets of 1950s
Bradford in a starched collar and bowler hat,
pushing an easel around in a pram, was clearly
destined for something. David Hockney has
since become something of a national treasure,
a prolific and versatile artist who has gained
an international reputation while never
losing touch with his working-class Yorkshire
background, held in high critical regard while
remaining popular with a broad public.
Now in his late seventies, Hockney is an affable,
unpretentious onscreen presence throughout this
appreciative biographical doc, featuring a whole
wealth of arts TV archive gathered together by
director Randall Wright, who’s also had access to
Hockney’s own precious Polaroids, home movies
and camcorder footage. Given the sundry friends
and colleagues also on hand to offer affectionate
comment, and space to be found for the work
itself, there’s evidently a twofold challenge here:
first, fitting everything in so that the viewer
can get a handle on the voluminous catalogue
of life and work; second, communicating some
deeper understanding about the man behind
the iconic LA swimming-pool canvases and
life-affirming latterday epic landscapes.
Wright does very well by the first of these
and, as Jack Hazan discovered before him, is on
a bit of a hiding to nothing with the second. As
a compendium of Hockney’s restlessly shape-
shifting output and the people and places in
his life, Hockney is a pleasure to spend time
with, delivering what’s in essence a cinematic
gallery guide to the Hockney exhibition of
your dreams. And cinematic it is too, giving the
locations from Bradford to Beverly Hills proper
room to breathe, allowing us to root around
the old boy’s various studios and residences,
and presenting the canvases in brilliant hi-def
digital, which does justice to the acrylic zing
of his early Californian era and the widescreen
multi-part vistas of Yorkshire that have
creatively re-energised him in recent years.
By returning time and again to Hockney’s
Bradford family connections, Wright keeps
a tight rein on the film’s overall rhythm and
timeframe, crucial when there’s so much material
to get through, but he has obviously made a
Splash of genius: David Hockney
decision to leave issues of critical perspective
to one side. The tone is warm and admiringly
curatorial throughout, leaving us with the
sense that in his mazy artistic journey (from
painting to drawing, photographic collage to
printmaking and even rather dainty iPhone
sketches) Hockney has never made a misstep
- which feels just a tad soft on an artist who,
we’re told, has often been hard on himself.
Wright fares better when allowing Hockney
the space to talk about his methods, and the
phrase “ways of seeing” keeps popping up,
usefully highlighting the notion - common to
Hockney’s diverse chosen media - that his largely
representational approach encourages the viewer
to perceive the world with fresh eyes. Evidently,
Hockney himself is someone who can stand
back and really look - hence the meticulously
traced imprint of swimming-pool spray in what
is probably his most famous painting - though
with that perhaps there is a price to be paid.
Today’s avuncular figure is far removed from the
slightly lost, emotionally marooned individual
in Hazan’s remarkable 1973 hybrid drama-
doc A Bigger Splash, but it’s as if there remains
something essentially unknowable about him.
This is deftly hinted at by the memorable closing
sequence, which has Hockney padding through
the brightly coloured verandas and refulgent
greenery of his LA pad as John Harle’s charming
score strikes up deliberate echoes of Jacques
Tati. Wright graciously leaves us by intriguingly
positing Hockney as a sort of art-world Hulot -
ever curious, a loveable optimist, a man apart. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
British Film Company
Charles Poe
Kate Ogborn
and the Smithsonian
Film Extracts
Randall Wright
Channel present a
Love's Presentation
Director of
Blakeway and Fly
(1966)
Photography
Film production
Patrick Duval
First Class Hero
In Colour
Editor
Productions Ltd
[1.85:1]
Paul Binns
has been supported
Music Composed
by the Yorkshire
Distributor
and Conducted by
Content Fund
Picturehouse
John Harle
Made with the
Entertainment
Sound Recordist
support of the
Geoff Price
BFI’s Film Fund
Executive Producers
©First Class Hero
Denys Blakeway
Productions Ltd /
Lisa Marie Russo
British Film Institute
Lizzie Francke
Production
Mark Bell
Companies
Hugo Heppell
BFI and BBC Arts
Steve Milne
in association with
Christian Eisenbeiss
Screen Yorkshire,
David Royle
A documentary tracing the life and work of British
artist David Hockney, now 77. Comprising newly shot
interviews with Hockney and various friends and
colleagues, it collates television and film archive,
plus home video and Polaroids provided by the artist.
The film retraces Hockney’s early progress from
working-class Bradford beginnings and study at the
Royal College of Art to a 1960s sojourn in California
that prompted some of his best-known paintings.
The film also sketches in the shifting relationships
in his personal life, alongside the continuing creative
restlessness in his later career. We see him moving
from painting to drawing; working frequently as a
set designer for opera; developing a new interest
in photographic collage; creating art on the latest
handheld devices; and finally returning to large-scale
landscape painting. What remains consistent is an
interest in finding new ways to look at the world, and a
continuing sense of connection to his Yorkshire roots.
74 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Honeymoon
USA 2013
Director: Leigh Janiak
Certificate 15 87m 30s
I Am Ali
USA/United Kingdom 2013
Director: Clare Lewins
Certificate PC 111m 22s
Reviewed Kim Newman
Leigh Janiak’s debut feature seems to be a
deliberate riff - in a quiet, minimalist way - on
Gene Fowler Jr’s luridly titled, surprisingly
acute paranoia movie I Married a Monster from
Outer Space (1958), in which a honeymoon is
similarly disrupted when one partner (in that
case, bridegroom Tom Tryon) is replaced by
a shapeshifting alien invader who’s come to
Earth to mate with the locals but seemingly has
no idea how to deal with his new wife (Gloria
Talbott). A literalisation of the ‘men are from
Mars, women are from Venus’ theory, Fowler’s
film has been rethought before - with alien-
possessed women - in John Krish’s underrated
Unearthly Stranger(ig64) and the daffy
comedy My Stepmother Is an Alien (1988). In all
variations on this theme, a new family member
reveals a sinister side, often expressed through
unfamiliarity with the simple rituals of everyday
humanity, but has a semi-plausible explanation
that shreds as the nightmare closes in.
Janiak cosily establishes Bea and Paul as a cute
couple in their wedding video diary, which aligns
the film to the found-footage trend. However,
the rest of the picture uses a more conventional
narrative style that makes this very much the
husband’s subjective take on what is happening.
The newlyweds are packed off alone to an isolated
lakefront cabin for their honeymoon, and the
charm leaches out of the place even before Bea has
her close encounter with something in the woods.
Especially unnerving is a quietly played sequence
in an out-of-season local restaurant where the
unaccountably angry proprietor tries to turn on
the charm when he recognises Bea as a childhood
friend - the cabin is her family’s holiday retreat
-but is too rattled by his odd, sullen wife to act
normally. Paul plainly thinks Bea has a history
with the restaurateur that she doesn’t want to
tell him about, and this seems for a while to be
reason enough for her sudden strange behaviour.
But one day Bea can barely put her hand in the
freezing water of the lake and the next she’s
jumping in enthusiastically; she’s forgotten how
to cook dishes she used to prepare well; and she
can’t explain the shredded nightie Paul finds in
the woods after she has vanished for a while.
Paul’s paranoia escalates as he is unsure
whether his wife has been altered or replaced - a
subject on which the film is eerily ambiguous,
hinting that this is still Bea’s body but her mind
is being usurped by another intelligence. In a
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
©Honeymoon
Cast
Patrick Baker
Productions Inc.
Rose Leslie
Esme Howard
Production
Bea
Written by
Company
Harry Treadaway
Phil Graziadei
Fewlas Entertainment
Paul
Leigh Janiak
presents
Ben Huber
Cinematographer
Executive Producers
Will
Kyle Klutz
Christopher A. Pilaro
Hanna Brown
Editor
Phoebe Pilaro
Annie
Christopher S.Capp
Julie Parker Benello
Production Designer
Allen C. Benello
In Colour
Chris Trujillo
John R. Dufour
[1.78:1]
Music
Brandon J.Dufour
Heather McIntosh
Daniel Troiano
Distributor
Sound Mixer
Arrow Film
Thomas Curley
Costume Designer
Courtney Arthur
Distributors Ltd
The odd couple: Rose Leslie, Harry Treadaway
gruesome body-horror moment that touches
on alien abduction mythology, a snake-like
umbilical organ is pulled out of Bea’s vagina,
only for the parasitic tentacle to serve as a ripcord
that seems to hasten her transformation into
something non-human. It’s plain that whoever
the invaders are, they have targeted our women
for takeover and our men for elimination,
but - as in 7 Married a Monster from Outer Space
and Unearthly Stranger- the taken-over spouse
retains her human host’s feelings, and goes
against her own programming to try to save her
husband. In a quiet, genuinely shocking climax,
the alienated Bea weighs Paul down with an
anchor so that he can ‘hide’ underwater, even as
he tries to explain to her that this won’t work.
Deftly played by attractive leads Rose Leslie and
Harry Treadaway, whose ideal-couple looks turn
effectively sinister in the half-light, with vivid
cameos from Ben Huber and Hanna Brown as
the only interlopers in this two-character drama.
Honeymoon is a striking, unsettling first feature. ©
US, present day. Newlyweds Bea and Paul honeymoon
in a lakefront cabin. Visiting a iocai restaurant, they
find Wiii, the proprietor, in a bad temper because his
wife Annie is acting strangeiy. Wiii recognises Bea
as an oid friend and tries to be weicoming. At night
Bea sieepwaiks into the woods and has an encounter
that prompts her to act out of character, forgetting
what she knows and drawing away from Paui. in pain,
she tries to remove a worm-iike creature from her
vagina - which she does with Paui’s heip. She admits
that another power is controiiing her but deciares
that she wiii protect Paui from it, which she does
by ‘hiding’ him in the iake, seemingiy unaware that
he wiii drown. With Paui dead, Bea and Annie waik
towards the iights that represent an aiien power.
I Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
That Muhammad Ali was The Greatest we
already know - he informed the press and his
public of this fact many, many times. There
was even a 1969 documentary by the Franco-
American photographer William Klein called
Muhammad Ali, the Greatest, one of a slew of
films about the man who, along with John
Wayne and Bruce Lee, vies for the title of most
famous male icon of the 20th century.
The latest of these is I Am Alihj Clare Lewins,
which reconfirms its subject’s greatness yet again.
“Boxing was just something he did,” says George
Foreman, who goes on to call his old ‘Rumble in
the Jungle’ opponent not just one of the greatest
fighters who ever lived, but one of the greatest
men. “You can’t measure [Ali] in the word great,”
says Mike Tyson, never at a loss when it comes
to giving good quote, “There has to be another
word created.” Hana Ali, Ali’s daughter with third
wife Veronica Porsche, recalls her mother being
reduced to tears after seeing a glimpse of God in
her ex-husband’s face. As you can well imagine,
after a while all of this gets pretty redundant.
Literally the only words said against Ali in
nearly two hours of screen time come in Porsche’s
tossed-off statement that “The whole world
knew he wasn’t faithful as a husband.” Earlier, as
friend Jim Brown talks about Ali, there is a clip
of him voicing the segregationist sentiments
that he espoused during the height of his fealty
to Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad, but
this isn’t given another thought. Nor, after an
archival footage appearance by Malcolm X, who
is heard expressing his admiration for the Champ,
is there any discussion of Ali’s abandonment
of Malcolm at Muhammad’s behest, during a
schism between the Nation of Islam leadership. I
do not mention any of these items because they
necessarily make Ali less than The Greatest. In
fact, they make him human, and we have seen
the human Ali far less often than the demigod.
I Am Ali seeks to justify its existence in a
crowded field of Aliana through the use of never-
before-heard private recordings that its subject
made of his own phone conversations. (It seems
that Ali shared a passion for self-surveillance
with another American icon of the
60s and 70s, Richard M. Nixon.) Most
Stings like a bee: I Am Ali
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 75
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
The Imitation Game
USA 2014
Director: Morten Tyidum
O of these merely allow us to eavesdrop
on All talking to his young children,
and while they show an unusually attentive
and loving father, they are not otherwise
enormously revealing of the Champ’s inner life.
Like Klein’s Muhammad Ali, the Greatest,
Lewins’s I Am Ali is not terribly interested in
the Sweet Science of Bruising itself - 1 would
hazard a guess that altogether it contains less
than ten minutes’ ringside footage, though
special attention is granted to Sir Henry Cooper’s
knockdown and near-knockout of Ali - then
Cassius Clay - in a 1963 bout. As a UK/US co-
production, I Am Ali concedes some attention to
Ali’s relationship with his British fans, including
a Tyneside man, Russ Routledge, whom Ali
invited to stay at his own property. What a great
guy, right? The Greatest! But is that all? ©
Man on fire: Muhammad Ali
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Clare Lewins
George Chignell
Greg Hobden
Written by
Clare Lewins
Director of
Photography
Stuart Luck
Fiim Editor
Reg Wrench
Sound Recordists
Los Angeles/
Las Vegas:
Adam Joseph
David Brill
©Universal Studios
Production
Companies
Focus World
presents a Fisheye
Films production
in association with
Passion Pictures
A Clare Lewins film
Executive
Producers
John Battsek
Simon Chinn
In Coiour
[1.85:1]
Distributor
Universal Pictures
International
UK & Eire
A documentary about three-times world heavyweight
boxing champion Muhammad Ali. Through interviews
with Ali’s family, friends and former rivals, the film
looks back to his boyhood in Louisville, Kentucky,
where he was born Cassius Clay in 1942; to his gold
medal performance at the 1960 Rome Olympics;
and to his surprise victory over Sonny Liston in
the world heavyweight championship in 1964. At
around this time. Clay joined the Nation of Islam
(and changed his name to Ali). He subsequently
refused to be conscripted by the US Army to serve
in Vietnam, and was stripped of his title. His boxing
ban was overturned by the Supreme Court in 1970,
and he returned to fight a series of legendary bouts,
among them the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ against
George Foreman and three fights against Joe Frazier.
In 1981, Ali attempted his final comeback, the
‘Drama in Bahama’, but he was already affected
by undiagnosed Parkinson’s disease, and lost
by a unanimous decision to Trevor Berbick.
Reviewed by Matthew Taylor
“Are you paying attention?” asks Benedict
Cumberbatch’s Alan Turing - mathematician,
pioneer of computer science and codebreaker
extraordinaire - as he prepares to disclose his
secrets in the opening scenes of The Imitation
Game. The nation that appallingly wronged
Turing after he played an instrumental part
in protecting it during WWII has certainly
paid belated attention in recent years: first, the
Gordon Brown government’s 2009 apology for
the charge of gross indecency and subsequent
order of chemical castration that preceded
Turing’s 1954 suicide by two years; then, in 2013,
a posthumous royal pardon. This year alone
has seen two separate Turing-inspired musical
productions, the only prior dramatisations
being Hugh Whitemore’s 1986 stage play
BreaUng the Code and its later BBC adaptation
(both starring Derek Jacobi as Turing). Michael
Apted’s 2001 feature removed Turing
from the equation entirely, furnishing the
Bletchley Park codebreaking centre with wholly
fictional characters. The manifold variety of
these depictions gives pause for thought: how
to represent this most complex of historical
figures? In the hands of Headhunters director
Morten Tyidum and debutant screenwriter
Graham Moore, the result is an efficient,
impeccably mounted but pedestrian biopic.
Drawn from Andrew Hodges’s 1983 biography,
Moore’s script shuttles between a framing police
interview following Turing’s post-war arrest,
the pivotal war years at Bletchley, where Turing
and his fellow cryptologists - including Joan
Clarke (Keira Knightley) and Hugh Alexander
(Matthew Goode) - broke the Nazis’ Enigma
cipher against all odds, and flashbacks to the
young Turing’s formative bond with a classmate
(whose name he later lends to the ingenious
machine, or ‘bombe’, that ultimately cracks
Enigma by imitating its settings). The tagline-
ready maxim offered by the latter - “It’s often
the people no one imagines anything of who do
the things no one can imagine” - is repeatedly
reprised; similarly declamatory dialogue tends
to ring forth throughout The Imitation Game.
Recruited by Bletchley in 1 9 3 9, Turing
immediately riles Charles Dance’s withering
commander by overanalysing the most
innocuous of quips. The scene neatly
establishes Turing’s singular personality and
thought processes, which initially render
him an inscrutable, fractious figure in the
eyes of colleagues: a man on solid ground
with algorithms but frequently at sea with
interpersonal communication. Eragile solidarity
eventually follows, as the team persists in the
face of shortsighted bureaucracy and scant
resources. Tyidum - whose direction is capable
but nondescript - brings a measure of the
clammy tension that suffused Headhunters to
these sequences, regularly splicing them with
ominous montages of the war’s daily toll.
The painful irony for Turing was that he
was forced to conceal his homosexuality
while simultaneously unmasking secrets for
the country that made it a crime. This is dealt
with sensitively, although there maybe some
credence to Hodges’s pre-production complaints
that it’s viewed largely through the prism of
Turing’s brief engagement to Clarke. While
she didn’t face the same dangers as Turing,
Clarke - a resilient egghead in an oppressively
male-dominated realm, played persuasively by
Knightley -nonetheless resonates as another
important signifier of progressive defiance.
Moore’s eager-to-please screenplay, on the
other hand, plays its own imitation game, in
being beholden to formula (Ron Howard’s A
Beautijul Mind, for one) - a manufactured quality
that occasionally creeps into Cumberbatch’s
otherwise committed, fastidious performance.
It’s a consummately polished package, one
that will no doubt gain its subject a deservedly
wide audience. But unlike Turing and the
elaborate codes he busted. The Imitation Game
all too readily reveals its calculated design. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Pictures presents
Alien Leech
Nora Grossman
in association
John Cairncross
Ido Ostrowsky
with Filmnation
Matthew Beard
Teddy Schwarzman
Entertainment a
Peter Hilton
Written by
Black Bear Pictures
Charies Dance
Graham Moore
production
Commander
Based on the
A Bristol Automotive
Denniston
book A/an Turing:
production
Mark Strong
The Enigma by
Supported by TFI
Stewart Menzies
Andrew Hodges
Sloan Filmmaker
Director of
Fund, a year round
Doiby Digitai
Photography
program of the
in Coiour
Oscar Faura
Tribeca Film Institute
[2.35:1]
Fiim Editor
The Weinstein
William Goldenberg
Company
Distributor
Production Designer
Executive Producer
Studiocanal Limited
Maria Djurkovic
Graham Moore
Music
Alexandre Desplat
Production
Cast
Sound Mixer
Benedict
John Midgley
Cumberbatch
Costume Designer
Alan Turing
Sammy Sheldon
Keira Knightiey
Differ
Joan Clarke
©BBP Imitation, LLC
Matthew Goode
Hugh Alexander
Production
Rory Kinnear
Companies
Detective
Black Bear
Robert Nock
Manchester, 1952. Mathematician Alan Turing reports
a burglary at his home. He is later arrested after
admitting a homosexual relationship with the thief.
Interviewed by a detective, Turing relates his life story.
In 1939, Turing is recruited by the Government
Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park, where
classified work has commenced on deciphering
German communications encrypted using the Enigma
machine. Turing hires Joan Clarke, an analyst with
whom he develops a close bond. Turing creates a
machine, or ‘bombe’, designed to replicate Enigma’s
settings. Turing’s colleagues are at first alienated
by his unsociable manner, but when the bombe
initially fails to obtain results, they rally to prevent
his dismissal and the machine’s deactivation. Turing
and Joan become engaged. When the team breaks
Enigma, Turing proposes that the military act on
only a fraction of intercepted communications in
order to avoid German suspicion. Turing’s colleague
John Cairncross is unmasked as a Soviet spy. The
war over, Turing tells Joan he cannot marry her,
despite her acceptance of his homosexuality.
In 1952, Turing pleads guilty to the charges,
accepting chemical castration over a prison
term. He commits suicide in 1954.
76 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Leviathan
Russian Federation 2014
Director: Andrey Zvyagintsev
Reviewed Ryan Gilbey
A journey by car in an Andrey
l Zvyagintsev film is typically
' something to be dreaded His
masterful 2003 debut The Return
hinges on a long and traumatic
road trip; its 2007 follow-up The Banishment
with a vehicle being driven in haste by a man
who is in the process of losing an awful lot of
blood No one could be blamed, then, for fearing
the worst in his latest picture. Leviathan. After
shots of waves lashing rocks under the gaze of
a mountainous landscape, we see a man, Kolia,
driving through the grey light to collect his friend
Dmitri from the train station. Later there will
indeed be a suspenseful car journey, but for now
any tension is restricted to legal matters: Dmitri
is a Moscow lawyer preparing to fight Kolia’s
comer against the corrupt mayor, Vadim. The
latter is trying to snatch from Kolia the coastal
plot on which he has built the house where he
lives with his wife and child. Over the subsequent
140 minutes, the class tensions of Zvyagintsev’s
Elena (2011) combine with the domestic angst
of The Banishmentto produce a film that is more
troubling and ambitiously scaled than either.
If the biblical connotations of the title
suggest drama of the highfalutin variety, the
perspective offers a worm’s-eye view. From the
grimly hilarious court appeal, in which the
particulars are read by a judge in a one-take
breakneck monologue that leaves no room for
breath, let alone interjection, there is never any
likelihood that Kolia will triumph against the
system. (The movie may be bleak but it is also
surprisingly abundant and nuanced in its use
of humour.) That title, after all, refers not only
to the whales glimpsed in the Barents Sea - or
to their cavernous skeletons, among which
Kolia’s son wanders. It applies also (as it does
in Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 book of the same
name, alluded to in the film) to the monstrous
forces of government against which men such
as Kolia, compared specifically by the town
priest to Job, can only offer stoical resignation.
The pleasure of the film lies in its forensic
skill at unpicking the intersecting layers of
governmental corruption and calumny that
doom the working class from the outset. There
would be no mistaking Zvyagintsev’s hitherto
opaque political allegiances, even if one only
had the target-practice scene to go on. Having
exhausted their supply of empty beer bottles,
a shooting party turns to framed portraits of
Russian leaders. Vladimir Putin is conspicuous
by his absence. “It’s too early for the current
ones,” says the policeman leading the shoot.
“Let them ripen on the walls.” But a scene in
which Putin’s image watches sinisterly over
an exchange between Vadim and Dmitri, not
to mention a later glimpse on a television
screen of the words ‘Pussy Riot’, leaves no
doubt as to the filmmaker’s sympathies.
Kolia may ask, pleadingly, “Why, Lord?”
during a moment of suffering, but religion
offers neither answers nor hope. Indeed, it is a
priest who expressly persuades Vadim to stick
to his guns in the land dispute and to regard
his own power as synonymous with the divine
one. Mapping this corroded moral structure in
State of revolution: Alexey Serebryakov
script form is something at which Zvyagintsev
and his co-writer Oleg Negin excel. They may
resort at times, both here and in The Banishment,
to the use of the wife figure as a repository
for pain rather than a character in her own
right. But it would be churlish to dispute the
crushing logic, the symbiotic inevitability, that
underpins every plot-point, however minor.
Zvyagintsev’s talents extend far beyond that.
What makes him an artist rather than simply a
craftsman is his ability to express in visual and
aural terms the themes and tensions that drive
the narrative. Philip Glass’s music is imposing
enough, even without knowing that it has been
transplanted from his 1983 o^eidi Akhnaten,
Credits and Synopsis
which explored power and religion through the
story of the pharaoh who pioneered monotheism.
Coupled with the dusky cinematography
of Mikhail Krichman, the effect is at once
breathtaking and oppressive. The majority of
the picture, whether interior or exterior, has
been lit and shot to create pools of darkness in
the foreground (in some scenes, the actors are
reduced almost to silhouettes). Illumination
does exist in this world - the mountains in
the distance are often streaked with sunlight.
In common with hope and comprehension,
that illumination lies stranded forever in the
distance, frustratingly beyond the reach of
Kolia and his woebegone countrymen. ©
Producers
Production Designer
A Non-Stop
Cast
Angela
In Colour
Alexander
Andrey Ponkratov
Production film
Alexey Serebryakov
Alexey Rozin
[2.35:1]
Rodnyanskiy
Sound
With the support
Kolia
Pacha
Subtitles
Sergey Melkumov
Andrey Dergachev
of the Ministry
Elena Lyadova
Sergey Pokhodaev
Screenplay
Costumes
of Culture of the
Lilya
Roma
Distributor
Oleg Negin
Anna Bartuli
Russian Federation,
Vladimir
Valeriy Grishko
Artificial Eye Film
Andrey Zvyagintsev
Cinema Fund and
Vdovichenkov
Bishop
Company
Cinematography
©Non-Stop
RuArts Foundation
Dmitri
Sergey Bachurskiy
Mikhail Krichman
Production
Executive Producer
Roman Madyanov
Stepanych
Editing
Production
Ekaterina Marakulina
Vadim Shelevyat
Platon Kamenev
Anna Mass
Companies
Anna Ukolova
Victor
Northwest Russia, the present. Koiia is ordered to
But with Dmitri having returned to Moscow, Koiia’s
surrender to local mayor Vadim the seafront house
he shares with his second wife, Liiya, and his son from
his first marriage, Roma. He eniists his friend, Moscow
iaywer Dmitri, to represent him. Dmitri has a dossier of
information with which he biackmaiis Vadim into backing
down. Hoping for re-eiection, Vadim is preparing to
reient when he receives advice from a priest, who teiis
him that aii power comes from God. With this in mind,
Vadim arranges for Dmitri to be beaten up. Koiia has
aiso had reason to turn against Dmitri after discovering
that he has been having an affair with Liiya. Koiia makes
peace with her despite Roma’s tearfui protestations.
home is now vuinerabie once again to Vadim. Koiia
goes to pick up Liiya from her factory job but finds
that she has not attended work that day and that her
phone number is unreachabie. Liiya is found dead on
the beach. Koiia raiis against the iocai priest, who teiis
him the story of Job. Homicide detectives burst into
Koiia’s home to arrest him for Liiya’s murder. He is
found guiity and sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment,
ieaving the way ciear for the house to be knocked down
and the iand seized by Vadim. Roma is offered a home
by friends of his father. Vadim attends a church service
where he teiis his own son that God sees everything.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 77
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Life Itself
USA 2014
Director: Steve James
Reviewed by Jason Anderson
Every reader knows how it feels
I to be intimately familiar with
a writer’s Voice’ and then be
surprised to learn how he or she
actually sounds - too high, too
nasal, too fast, too southern, not southern enough.
Chances are it’s been a long time since anyone
had that experience with Roger Ebert. Eor all the
appeal of the “clear, plain-spoken, Midwestern
style” that film critic Ebert deployed on the page
- to borrow a description used by the New York
Time^ A.O. Scott in Steve James’s affectionate
and thoughtful portrait - his voice may have
been his most readily identifiable attribute,
arguably even more so than the ever-so-powerful
thumb that he wielded alongside his longtime
TV partner Gene Siskel as they determined
which new releases would gain their blessing
and which would be named ‘Dog of the Week’.
That’s why it felt like such a shock to lose that
voice when it was silenced with the removal of
Ebert’s lower jaw in 2006, a brutal skirmish in the
I i-year battle with cancer that ended in 201 3. Of
course, Ebert himself wasn’t silenced by the surgery
- far from it. Indeed, a more personal and intimate
voice would emerge in the voluminous array
of blog entries, reviews and other writings with
which he filled his final years. Material from those
blogs would form the basis for the moving 2011
memoir with which James’s film shares its name.
But one of the most fascinating aspects
of Lifeltselfis how it becomes a catalogue of
Ebert’s various speaking voices as well. Along
with the familiar sound of its subject in the
many archival clips - which chart the critic’s
transformation from the skittish nerd introducing
Ingmar Bergman films in his first on-camera
gig in the early 1970s into the tuxedoed jetsetter
hobnobbing with Robert De Niro in a Cannes
report for his TV show in the 1980s or holding
court at Boulder’s Conference on World Affairs
in the 1990s - there’s the Mac-generated version
of his last years, in which he refused to allow his
disfigurement to prevent him from continuing
his life as one of cinema’s most impassioned
and most public advocates. And while you
may expect his voice synthesiser to be the least
mellifluous, it’s actually more jarring to hear the
eerily Ebert-like sound of Stephen Stanton, an
impressionist enlisted by James to read passages
from the memoir on the film’s soundtrack.
Plenty of other people get the chance to
speak here too, a fact that makes James’s film
less of an adaptation of Ebert’s memoir than an
equally rich and engaging companion piece. In
fact, James succeeds in going beyond the usual
hagiography by devoting greater attention to
thornier subjects such as Ebert’s complicated
dynamic with Siskel, as well as the massive and
not necessarily positive impact their show had
on the ways movies were received, perceived
and marketed. Never before had lowly reviewers
become celebrities themselves, though Siskel and
Ebert’s show Sneak Previews (and its successor
At the Movies) was a phenomenon that seems
unlikely to ever be repeated. Eor one thing, even
the rare critic who possesses a fraction of Ebert’s
expertise and tenacity struggles to be heard in
the crowded pack of thumb-wielders in the
Critical condition: Roger Ebert
blogosphere, a community Ebert actively fostered
in the final stage of his career. Eor another, the
show’s popularity had less to do with the hosts’
critical acumen than their determination to never
let the other one have the last word - the result
was something other than a show about films
that happen to be good or bad. It functioned more
like, as Richard Corliss puts it here, “a sitcom
about two guys who lived in a movie theatre”.
Unsurprisingly, the story of their often
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Zak Piper
Steve James
Garrett Basch
Based upon
the memoir Life Itself
by Roger Ebert
Director of
Photography
Dana Kupper
Edited by
David E. Simpson
Steve James
Music
Joshua Abrams
Location Sound
Zak Piper
©Life Itself, LLC
Production
Companies
CNN Films presents a
Kartemquin Films and
Film Rites production
in association with
KatLei Productions
A film by Steve James
Executive Producers
Martin Scorsese
Steven Zaillian
Michael W. Ferro Jr
Gordon Quinn
Justine Nagan
Kat White
Mark Mitten
Film Extracts
Bonnie and
C/ycfe(1967)
Beyond the Valley
of the Dolls (1970)
VIskningar och
rop/Criesand
mispers{\912)
Rocky (1976)
Apocalypse
Now (1979)
Scarface (1983)
Crash (1996)
LastAction
Hero (1993)
Once upon a
Forest (1993)
Jurassic Park (1992)
El Norte (1983)
Gates of Heaven
(1978)
Man Push Cart
(2005)
I Will Follow (2010)
Encounters at the End
of the World (2007)
Who’s That Knocking
at My Door (1968)
Raging Bull (1980)
The Color of
Money (1986)
Full Meta! Jacket
(1987)
The Tree of
Life (2010)
La dolce vita (1960)
Ikiru (1952)
Sweet Smell of
Success (1957)
Belle de Jour (1967)
This Is Spinal Tap
A Rockumentary
by Martin Di
Bergi (1983)
Nashville (1975)
2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968)
Citizen Kane (1941)
In Colour
[1.78:1]
Distributor
Dogwoof
rancorous partnership is the most compelling
strand in James’s film, though Ebert’s less
prickly and more generous side is duly praised
by his wife Chaz and many of the filmmakers
he supported (a group that includes James,
whose landmark 1994 doc Hoop Dreams
benefited greatly from Ebert’s thumb). With
the man’s passing, American film lost not just
an inimitable figure but a voice that was as
forceful and distinctive as it was ubiquitous. ©
Chicago, late 2012. Roger Ebert is admitted to
hospital with a fractured hip and begins a bout of
rehabilitation with the help of his wife Chaz. It is the
latest in a series of health problems for the longtime
‘Chicago Sun-Times’ film critic and broadcaster, who
lost the ability to speak or eat properly when his
treatment for cancer necessitated the removal of
his lower jaw in 2006. Despite the evident toll this
battle has taken on him, he retains his vigour and
infiuence as a critic, having been newly energised
by his embrace of blogging and social media.
Details of Ebert’s biography are interspersed
with scenes of Ebert and Chaz in hospital and email
conversations between Ebert and the film’s director
Steve James. Friends, family members, colleagues
and fellow critics refiect on his career at the ‘Sun-
Times’, his early struggle with alcoholism, his foray
into screenwriting with director Russ Meyer and his
accomplishments as a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.
Yet Ebert may have made his most dramatic impact on
American film criticism through his role as the co-host
of his television shows with Gene Siskel, with whom he
enjoyed a close if often combative relationship until
the latter’s death in 1999. Filmmakers such as Martin
Scorsese and Ramin Bahrani speak of their friendship
with Ebert and their gratitude for his support.
In 2013, cancer is discovered to be the cause of
Ebert’s hip fracture. In his last public statement,
Ebert announces “a leave of presence” due to the
need for radiation treatment. On 4 April, Ebert dies
at the age of 70. A week later his life is celebrated
at a public memorial at the Chicago Theatre.
78 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Includes:
• All 20 surviving episodes from Series 1-4
• Digitally remastered picture and sound
• Return of the Unknown: all-new documentary
featuring interviews with cast and crew,
and rare clips
• 11 audio commentaries with cast and crew, including
Philip Saville, Wendy Gifford and Peter Sasdy
• An interview with director James Cellan Jones
• Four missing episode reconstructions
• Extensive stills galleries
• Fully illustrated booklet with essays and full
episode credits
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REVIEWS
Luna
United Kingdom 2014
Director: Dave McKean
Certificate 15 105m 53s
Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy.
Thailand/ltaly/USA/United Arab Emirates 2013
Director: Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit
Reviewed by Kim Newman
Dave McKean takes a ‘designed and directed
by’ credit on his third feature after the strange
half-animated children’s fantasy MirrorMask
(2005) and the Port Talbot passion play The
Gospel of Us (2012). McKean first made his
reputation as a comic-book artist, though
even his most mainstream work {Arkham
Asylum, with Grant Morrison, and Black Orchid,
with Neil Gaiman) owes more to the collage
creations of animators Jan Svankmajer or
the Brothers Quay than the conventional
superheroics of, say. Jack Kirby or Neal Adams.
It’s plain that here he is channelling parts of
his career into the characters of slightly smug,
well-intentioned Dean (an illustrator who is
working on children’s books, though he thinks
he’s childless and is accused of not even liking
children) and his principled but bitter and
destructive art-school friend Grant (who isn’t
painting any more but teaches art to special-
needs kids). Apart from anything else, the art we
see around the isolated clifftop cottage where
Dean lives with his much younger wife Freya is
plainly McKean’s, and the pictures and objects
carefully placed in the frame have a tendency to
become conduits for fantastical intrusions into
what seems a mundane conversational drama.
As Lunahtgins, Grant and his wife Christine
arrive to spend the weekend with Dean and Freya;
they are still mourning their son Jacob, who died
in infancy. The film opens with a fully animated
sequence which hints that the humans here are
avatars of dolls rather than the other way round,
and then subtly keeps up the magic: various
manifestations of Jacob (identifiable by crescent-
moon tattoos) appear to various characters;
grieving Christine crawls into a giant gourd to
join loving but faintly disturbing figures with
full- and quarter-moon heads; a sketch turns into
an origami crab that comes to animated life when
buried, scuttling through the last reel of the film.
An insistent, evocative score (also by McKean)
imbues the film with tides of emotion not
always expressed by the traditionally brittle and
flip quartet of nice yet fractured middle-class
creative folk under the microscope. As Freya,
Stephanie Leonidas (the awkward goth teenage
heroine of MirrorMask) is again at the centre
of the pattern, though she also has the Meg
TillY-in-The Big ChillrolQ of coming in late to
an established set of relationships and having
Heart and craft: George Brooks
to be brought up to speed on the permutations
of a complex tangle of love and resentment.
Like most animators who become live-action
directors - a tradition that includes Frank Tashlin,
Walerian Borowczyk and Terry Gilliam, plus
Svankmajer and the Quays - McKean is as adept
at shaping performances from real people as
he is at making inanimate objects expressive. If
Leonidas has to be elfin and affirming, except
when telling a grim anecdote about the cottage’s
previous owner that feints towards ghost-story
territory, then Michael Maloney, Ben Daniels and
Dervla Kirwan have to rise to the challenge of
playing people who think they’ve already said
everything they need to say to each other (though
revelations come along to order) and have settled
into an uneasy friendship that flares up and dies
down according to the degree of intoxication,
background magic or resentment in the air at
any given time. A knocked-over wine bottle spills
what looks like a gout of gore as Grant goes from
needling his friend about the fact that one of his
paintings was found in Saddam Hussein’s private
collection of “dungeons and dragons shit” to
simple abuse. Yet the two artists - it’s suggested
that Grant is the more talented, and Dean has
always needed his approval - work happily
together for an afternoon, creating an “exquisite
corpse” collage from their sketches. Magic, in the
many forms of Jacob, is healing, but so is tango,
which Freya cites as the perfect embodiment of
the balance she’s sought and attained in her life. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Producer
Production
Michaei Maioney
Simon Moorhead
Sound Mixer
Dean
Screenplay
Ian Sands
Maurice Roeves
Dave McKean
Costumes
Jacob as the doctor
Story
Robert Lever
Dave McKean
in Coiour
Allen Spiegel
©Luna The Movie Ltd
[2.35:1]
Directors of
Executive Producers
Photography
Clive Banks
Distributor
Antony Shearn
Keith Griffiths
Miracle Films
Luke Bryant
Editors
Dave McKean
Cast
Emily Rosen-Rawlings
Ben Danieis
Designed by
Grant
Dave McKean
Dervia Kirwan
Composers
Christine
lain Ballamy
Stephanie Leonidas
Dave McKean
Freya
UK, the present. Dean, a successful illustrator, lives
with his much younger partner Freya in an isolated
clifftop house. Grant and Christine, who have known
Dean since art school, come to spend the weekend.
They are still shaken by the recent death of their
infant son Jacob, though he seems to manifest in
various spirit forms when needed. Dean and Grant
have longstanding artistic differences, and their
relationship is complicated because Dean was once
involved with Christine, and paid for her to have an
abortion. Christine admits to Dean that in fact the baby,
a boy, was adopted, and she has recently met their now
adult son. Grant has a drunken scuffle with Dean and
is injured while running about the countryside; Jacob,
in the form of a doctor, magically heals him. The four
friends are reconciled. Freya teaches Grant to tango.
Reviewed Anton Bitel
“Is it too sad? Should I delete it?”, Mary Malony
(Patcha Poonpiriya) asks her best friend Suri
(Chonnikan Netjui) near the beginning
of Nawapol Thamrongrattanarit’s Mary Is
Happy, Mary Is Happy. “But it’s so pretty.”
Thamrongrattanarit, like Mary, is concerned
with locating and preserving the aesthetic and
narrative pleasures of sadness and loss - yet
the fact that the colourful bird Mary has just
photographed is a dead parrot hints also at the
Pythonesque absurdity Thamrongrattanarit will
bring to lighten these otherwise heavy themes. In
her final term of high school, Mary is on the cusp
of adulthood, while also facing her first awkward,
painful crushes and a possible future without Suri
constantly by her side - and the pretty bird lying
on the ground will soon find human analogues
in fellow schoolgirls who vanish or die. Mary Is
Happy, Mary Is Happy is a coming-of-age story
preoccupied as much with the leaving behind as
with the moving forward, although in capturing
his softly spoken heroine in a period of great
change, Thamrongrattanarit does not shrink
from surreal digressions (exploding phones,
dawn peacock hunts, bakery attacks etc).
Soon Mary turns her photographic skills to
producing “a yearbook to remember everyone”,
infused with her own quirky tastes. “I wanna
do a minimalist style, with a photo book,” she
explains, “Spare text with beautiful photos.”
She will also start noting down on the backs
of receipts all the puzzling, random-seeming
incidents in her life, like a sort of Sibylline
diary, with the express purpose of “calculating
future probability”. Both the yearbook and the
piecemeal diary are reflexes for the structure
of Thamrongrattanarit’s film itself. Where his
feature debut 36 (2012) confined itself to 36
headed still-frame shots, mimicking the number
of exposures in a conventional 35mm film
roll, the von Trier-like obstruction that he has
chosen for Mary Is Happy, Mary Is Happy, is to
build his story around 410 consecutive tweets
(which regularly appear in the centre of the
screen) taken from a real-life Twitter user ((a)
marylony). Choosing a set of her tweets that
arbitrarily spanned the period between his
being accepted for the Venice Biennale College
Workshop and his proposed project being
selected (in January 2013), Thamrongrattanarit
uses them to extrapolate fictively, often wildly,
a slice of a young woman’s life - and thus offers
a vivid model for the way that personal identity
is both packaged and unpacked in the age of
social media. This desultory, hyperbolic stream
(of consciousness) may, with its violent mood
swings, smell just like teen spirit - but it equally
reflects the fragmentary, adolescent forms of
Twitter too. Yearbooks, diaries, tweets and youth
itself are all embodiments of ephemerality-yet
transitory need not mean trivial, and although
Thamrongrattanarit takes a mostly playful
look at the melancholic vagaries of Mary’s
life, there is also the sense that he is capturing,
on the fly, something vital and urgent about
modern human experience and the multifaceted,
polysemic nature of our virtual lives.
Even as these tweets are appropriated,
misconstrued, reconfigured and ironised to
80 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
My Old Lady
USA/United Kingdom/France 2014
Director: Israel Horovitz
Certificate 12A 106m 50s
Tweet me right: Patcha Poonpiriya
embroider Mary’s onscreen existence, she
openly struggles to understand the mysterious
external forces that appear to be pulling her
strings. “Recently my life’s been so weird, I do
things without any reason,” she confides to Suri,
“It’s like being controlled.” Indeed, when her
headmaster suddenly dies (everything happens
suddenly in this film), his replacement brings
a fascist order to the school, and Mary finds her
creative control over the yearbook being wrested
from her. As she muses on issues of free will and
determinism, she is also articulating the tug of
war between the autonomous authority of the
tweets and the artificial, sometimes perverse
interpretation that Thamrongrattanarit’s
adaptation imposes on them. Thamrongrattanarit
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Biennale College
Wattanapume
AdityaAssarat
Cinema
Laisuwanchai
Written by
in partnership
AsanoJr
Nawapol
with Gucci
Thamrongrattanarit
a Pop Pictures
In Colour
This film is adapted
production
[1.85:1]
from 410 consecutive
with the support
Subtitles
tweets of Mary
of MiBAC, Regione
Malony’s Twitter
del Veneto
Distributor
stream (@marylony)
in collaboration
Day for Night
Director of
with IFP 9th Dubai
Photography
International Film
Pairach Khumwan
Festival, TFL-
Editor
TorinoFilmLab
Chonlasit Upanigkit
Production Designer
Rasiguet Sookkarn
Cast
Original Music Score
Patcha Poonpiriya
Somsiri Sangkaew
Mary
Sound Recordist
Chonnikan Netjui
Sarawut Panta
Suri
Costume Designer
Vasuphon
PhimU-mari
Kriangprapakit
M
©Pop Pictures
Udomporn
Co., Ltd
Hongladdaporn
Production
Kun
Companies
Rossarin
La Biennale di
Ananchanachai
Venezia presents
Tim
himself makes two bizarre ‘divine’ interventions
in the film, first via a signed printout of the film’s
title (prompting Mary to ask, “Why me? This is
freaky. Who’s Nawapol?”), and second voicing
the most intractable of all (a)marylony’s tweets,
“tannase is an enzyme”, from the shadows
of the school’s basement dungeon. There is
also a cameo from Jean-Luc Godard or at least
a lookalike, and several references to Wong
Kar-wai - even if Mary believes he directed Life
of Pie (sic). Mary imagines her life as a movie,
so why shouldn’t Thamrongrattanarit? Mary
Is Happy, Mary Is Happy delivers an offbeat
yet entirely palatable feed of contradictory
insights into the difficult teen years - both
sad and pretty - of our new millennium. ©
Thailand, 2012. In their final term of high school,
Mary Malony and her best friend Suri embark on a
project to design the school yearbook, photographing
one classmate per day on the school rooftop during
magic hour. A research trip to the jungle (funded by
the art teacher) ends with Mary hospitalised after
she accidentally ingests magic mushrooms. Mary
falls in love with M., and takes a solo trip to Paris.
The art teacher quits, and Mary is hospitalised again
when her knock-off mobile phone explodes (not for
the first time). Mary and Suri find the suicide note of
missing classmate Gift in the jungle. The headmaster
dies (his last words being “Mary soon”), and his
replacement runs the school in a tyrannical manner.
Mary starts using the backs of receipts to note down
the strange things that happen to her. Already lovesick
over M., Mary is unhappy that Suri may be leaving
to study in Austria, and indignant that the school
is curtailing her creative control over the yearbook.
Sent into a tailspin of depression by Suri’s sudden
death, Mary is encouraged by the school doctor
to repeat the mantra ‘Mary is happy’. She is briefly
imprisoned in the school’s basement for speaking
her mind about the yearbook. Finally, she leaves
school and goes home to face an uncertain future.
Reviewed by Thirza Wakefield
“Your truth, not mine,” corrects Mathias (Kevin
Kline), trying to make clear to the intractable
Mathilde (Maggie Smith) that Max, her lover
of many years, was not the man he knew.
Max, recently deceased, was Mathias’s father,
and indifferent to a fault: “If you want to kill
a kid, don’t shoot him; do nothing.” Mathias,
an American (he prefers to go by the name of
Jim), has landed in Paris to oversee the sale of
the apartment he’s inherited - only to find that
it’s a yzh^erproperty and has been occupied
for more than 40 years by English emigre
Mathilde Girard. Unable to oust Mathilde and
contracted to pay her a monthly sum of €2,400
until her death, Mathias realises, with muted
surprise, that he’s “actually inherited a debt”.
Israel Horovitz’s play - adapted and directed
for the screen by the playwright - seems at first
to be a common-or-garden comedy-drama about
material inheritance, but there’s more to this
unassuming film than meets the eye. The same
could be said of Mathias, whose character is not
underwritten, as one may be tempted to think,
but deliberately and brilliantly muffled, at least
initially, by his all-encompassing obsession with
exhuming a pecuniary runner’s-up prize from
the property. This is reasonable enough, given
that Mathias - 5 7 and three times divorced -
has no money in the world outside the fortune
sealed within the apartment’s walls, and no
ticket back to America. Reasonable, except
that even after he is invited to stay until he
finds alternative lodgings, he unabashedly asks
Mathilde’s doctor about her life expectancy, and
openly attempts to hawk the contract
to a hotel developer with whom the Girards
have feuded for generations, risking leaving
Mathilde and her live-in middle-aged daughter
Chloe (Kristin Scott Thomas) without a home.
Clues to the main arteries of Mathias’s
character are dispersed through the first half of
the film but so discreetly that one wouldn’t know
them for breadcrumbs. His unkempt appearance,
as he paces the apartment cocooned in a paisley
eiderdown, begins to make emotional sense
when we learn that he once tried to commit
suicide, like his mother before him - though
she succeeded. Mathias is a beaten man,
his life the toxic fingerprint of his father’s
Flat out: Maggie Smith
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 81
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
The Necessary Death of Charlie Countryman
USA 2013
Director: Fredrik Bond
Certificate 15 103m 13s
© affair and his mother’s despair. Wrapped
in humour, the film is far from mawkish
in its approach to inheritance - one especially
funny interlude crosshatches Mathias sinking
bottle after bottle of wine by the Seine with the
satyric carved-stone faces of the Pont Neuf. But
Mathias is right: self-esteem isn’t hereditary,
it’s given by one’s parents, and so - by the mere
consciousness of its possibility - is suicide.
Horovitz’s film soundly balances the interests
of all three principal characters, and hides under
a bushel the bloom of a love-plot that’s touching
in its reserve. When Chloe tells Mathias that she’s
past being beautiful, he returns to her later with
his answer: “The perfect flower is nearly old.” It’s
more than just a late-coming compliment - it
demonstrates the hopeful potential of second
attempts. Horovitz, on the other hand, needs
no second time around: his directorial feature
debut is an intelligent, modest film, tightly
whorled - like Mathias’s perfect flower. ©
1 Credits and Synopsis
Producers
Protagonist Pictures
Raphael Benoliel
Rachael Horovitz
and Tumbledown
Russ Krasnoff
Gary Foster
Productions
Nitsa Benchetrit
Limited a Cohen
David C. Barrot
Media Group, Deux
Cast
Written for the
Cheveaux/Katsize
Kevin Kline
Screen by
Films production
Mathias Gold
Israel Horovitz
in association with
Kristin Scott
Based on his play
Krasnoff/Foster
Thomas
Director of
Entertainment
Chloe Girard
Photography
An Israel
Maggie Smith
Michel Amathieu
Horovitz film
Mathilde Girard
Editors
This film benefited
Stephane Freiss
Jacob Craycroft
from the French
Frangois Roy
Stephanie Ahn
Tax Rebate for
Dominique Pinon
Production
International
Auguste Lefebvre
Designer
Production
Noemie Lvovsky
Pierre-Francois
This production
Dr Florence Horowitz
Limbosch
participated in
Music
the New York
Dolby Digital
Mark Orton
State Governor’s
In Colour
Sound Mixer
Office for Motion
[2.35:1]
Jean-Paul Mugel
Picture & Television
Costume Designer
Development’s
Distributor
Jacqueline Bouchard
Post Production
Credit Program
Curzon Film World
©Deux Chevaux
Made with the
Inc. and British
support of BBC Films
Broadcasting
Executive
Corporation
Producers
Production
Christine Langan
Companies
JoeOppenheimer
Cohen Media
Charles S. Cohen
Group and BBC
Daniel Battsek
Films present in
MikeCoodridge
association with
Israel Horovitz
France, present day. Mathias Gold is a 57-year-old
American who has recently inherited his father’s
Paris apartment. He discovers that it is a ‘viager’
apartment, and 92-year-old occupant Mathilde Girard
can continue to live in it until her death. Mathias is,
moreover, contracted to pay Mathilde a monthly sum.
Also living in the apartment is Mathilde’s middle-
aged daughter Choe. Mathilde offers to let Mathias
stay until he finds other lodgings. Mathias - who is
penniless save for the apartment - discovers that
the property is worth €12 million. Raising money
for the monthly payment, he sells furnishings
from the apartment. He attempts to sell on the
‘viager’ contract to hotel developer Frangois Roy,
with whom the Girards have a longstanding feud.
Mathias learns that Mathilde and his father Max
had a long love affair. Chloe tells Mathias that she
found out about the affair when she was ten; Mathias
reveals to Chloe that he witnessed his mother’s
suicide. Chloe invites Mathias to stay indefinitely.
He gives her his notebook of collected thoughts on
their corresponding upbringings, and they kiss.
Reviewed by Adam Nayman
The ungainly title of this dismal debut feature
from commercials director Fredrik Bond at least
addresses the fact that its titular hero is someone
audiences might not mind seeing knocked off.
An alternate moniker might have been An Idiot
Abroad As played by the singularly uninspiring
Shia LaBeouf, Charlie is a singularly uninteresting
protagonist - a stringy Chicagoan nonentity
who is advised by the spirit of his dead mother
(Melissa Leo) to take a trip to Bucharest. It’s
portentous advice that introduces notions of
fate and destiny to what otherwise might seem
a typical shaggy-dog-out-of-water thriller.
En route to Romania, Charlie strikes
up a conversation with a fellow airplane
passenger, who promptly dies, but not before
i) commiserating over the sad history of the
Chicago Cubs and 2) asking his seatmate
to deliver something to his daughter, who
conveniently lives in Bucharest as well. Said
daughter, Gabi, is played by Evan Rachel Wood
with a short haircut and a wavering accent, and
Charlie immediately falls head over heels in
love with her - a compromising position to be
in when her husband is a glowering gangster
played by Mads Mikkelsen. So Charlie keeps his
distance, falling in with a couple of drug-addled
hostel-surfers (Rupert Grint and James Buckley)
and suffering recreational hallucinations that
look suspiciously like high-end television
advertisements, except with more full-frontal
female nudity - proof that Bond is taking full
artistic advantage of the feature-film medium.
There’s more than a pinch of Guy Ritchie
here, not only in the supercharged, candy-
coloured visual atmosphere and laddish sense of
humour, but also the strenuously eccentric tone.
Everything in Charlie Countryman is ‘weird’ in a
way that’s less genuinely uncanny than carefully
calculated. Bond directs like a visionary with
blinkers on. He can compose individual shots and
even string together decent sequences - there’s
a pretty good foot chase, for instance - but he
has no real perspective on the eastern European
locations (which he unimaginatively shoots like
bustling hellscapes) or on his characters’ desires,
which keep getting conveniently tweaked to
1 Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Companies
James Buckley
Albert Berger
Voltage Pictures
Luc
RonYerxa
and Picture Perfect
Vincent D’Onofrio
Craig J. Flores
Corporation present
Bill
William Horberg
in association with
Melissa Leo
Written by
Soundford Limited a
Katie
Matt Drake
Voltage Films/Bona
John Hurt
Director of
Fide production
narrator
Photography
Executive Producers
Ion Caramitru
Roman Vasyanov
Nicolas Chartier
Victor Ibanescu
Editor
Patrick Newall
Andrei Finti
Hughes Winborne
Dean Parisot
Bela
Production Designer
Vanessa Kirby
Joel Collins
Felicity
Music
Cast
Christophe Beck
Shia LaBeouf
Dolby Digital
Deadmono
Charlie Countryman
In Colour
Sound Mixer
Evan Rachel Wood
[2.35:1]
Dragos Stanomir
Gabi Ibanescu
Subtitles
Costume Designer
Mads Mikkelsen
Jennifer Johnson
Nigel
Distributor
Til Schweiger
Entertainment Film
©Countryman
Darko
Distributors Ltd
Nevada, LLC
Rupert Grint
Production
Karl
Bar association: Evan Rachel Wood, Shia LaBeouf
serve the plot. Gabi is a particularly dull archetype
- the kept hottie in need of a white-knight
rescuer - while Charlie only seems to heed the
call of adventure because the film needs him to.
It’s witty, perhaps, to cast LaBeouf as a callow
guy to whom almost exclusively humiliating
things happen. He’s constantly being knocked
out or run over, like Wile E. Coyote. But even this
strategy grows boring and repetitive, partially
because the actor can’t even convincingly play a
punching bag. The only performer who emerges
with his dignity intact is Mikkelsen, who’s better
than his stock role and dialogue and knows
it all too well. Pouting, posing and snarling,
he’s having a good time. He’s the only one. ©
Chicago, the present. Charlie Countryman goes to the
hospital to be with his mother as she dies; afterwards,
she appears to him as a spirit and suggests that he
take a trip to Bucharest. On the plane, he meets an
old man, Victor, who says that he has a daughter in
Bucharest; he asks Charlie to deliver a gift to her, and
dies before the plane lands. In Bucharest, Charlie finds
Victor’s daughter Gabi, who is a cellist, and meets her
husband Nigel, a gangster. Charlie hangs out with other
young men at his hostel and strikes up a courtship
with Gabi, who warns him that Nigel is dangerous,
and that her father had planned to blackmail him with
an incriminating videotape. Nigel has Charlie beaten
up and arrested, but Charlie eludes the police. Gabi
rejects Charlie and leaves in a car with Nigel; Charlie,
inspired by another conversation with his dead mother,
gives pursuit and fights Nigel, but loses. Nigel is
about to shoot him when Gabi volunteers to do it and
deliberately only wounds him slightly; Charlie plummets
into a lake. Nigel is killed by the police. Charlie
resurfaces, alive and well. He and Gabi are reunited.
82 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Night Train to Lisbon
Germany/Switzerland/Portugal/USA 2012
Director: Bille August
Certificate 12A 111m 6s
No Good Deed
USA 2014
Director: Sam Miller
Certificate 15 83m 45s
Reviewed Adam Nayman
At the beginning of Night Train to Lisbon, literature
professor Raimund Gregorius (Jeremy Irons)
has nothing better to do than stay at home and
play with himself: the game is chess, but a shot
of his empty bed suggests no shared sex life to
speak of. Enter a beautiful young woman in a red
coat, rain-drenched and suicidal. It’s an arrival
right out of a classic noir, and this ominously
romantic opening - a meet-cute on a bridge in
Bern, Switzerland, with life and death hanging
in the balance - combined with the cloak-
and-dagger intimations of the title, indicates
that Bille August’s film might be great fun.
It isn’t. Dutifully adapted from a novel by Swiss
author Pascal Mercier and directed by August
in the sort of stately, wan manner earned by
two long-ago Palmes d’Or, Night Train to Lisbon
is a thriller without a pulse. After saving the
mystery woman’s life by grabbing her bodily and
dragging her to one of his classes, Raimund loses
track of her; helpfully, his lecture for the day is
on Marcus Aurelius and his dictum that “a man
of thought is also a man of action”, so he has a
good excuse to pursue her. This means leafing
through the book she was carrying - written by
a famed Portuguese doctor and revolutionary -
and using the train ticket hidden therein to hop
a lift to Lisbon, where he hopes to find the lady.
But she is a (literal) red herring: the story
Raimund discovers is much older, and involves
the book’s author, one Amadeu de Prado, played
in flashbacks by Jack Huston, who looks about
as Portuguese as apple pie. Predictably, while
sussing out Amadeu’s role in the resistance
movement against the Salazar dictatorship in
the late 1960s (the terrors of which are rendered
far too tastefully), Raimund goes through a
transformative experience of his own. He obtains
Scenes from a carriage: Gedeck, Irons
new glasses from a cute local optician (a dull
metaphor for renewed vision) and sharpens
his sleuthing skills, interviewing as part of his
investigations a parade of wizened locals played
by variably accented character actors: it seems
that everybody from Charlotte Rampling to Bruno
Ganz to Christopher Lee couldn’t resist the lure of
a nice, fat, European co-production pay cheque.
The theme here is what it means to be a
man of principles, and as Raimund measures
himself against Amadeu - a great orator and
humanist who could do everything from perform
emergency throat surgery at dinner to win
the heart of a girl played by the unspeakably
lovely Mdanie Laurent - he comes up wanting.
But it’s implied that he has improved himself
in the process. How wonderful for him. Lor
the rest of us, watching Irons skulk around
in between appointments with his similarly
uninterested co-stars is a chore - about as
rewarding as playing chess with oneself. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Producers
Peter Reichenbach
Gunther Russ
Kerstin Ramcke
Screenplay
Greg Latter
Ulrich Herrmann
Based on the novel
by Pascal Mercier
Director of
Photography
Filip Zumbrunn
Editor
HansjbrgWeissbrich
Production Design
Augusto Mayer
Composer
Annette Focks
Sound Mixer
Raoul Grass
Costume Design
Monika Jacobs
©Studio Hamburg
FilmProduktion
GmbH,C-FilmsAG,
C-Films Deutschland
GmbH.CinemateSA
Production
Companies
K5 International
presents in
association with K5
Film and PalmStar
Media Capital
a production of
Studio Hamburg
FilmProduktion
GmbH and C-Films AG
in co-production with
Cinemate SA, C-Films
(Deutschland)
GmbH, TMG -Tele
Munchen Group
A Bille August film
In collaboration with
ZDF, Swiss Television
SRF, Teleclub
Supported by
Eurimages,
Filmforderung
Hamburg-Schleswig
Holstein, FFA,DFFF,
Medienboard Berlin
Brandenburg,
Bundesamt fur
KulturBAK,ICA,
Zurcher Filmstiftung
Media Development/
Slate Funding: i2i
AudiovisueLTurismo
de Portugal, Turismo
de Lisboa, Camera
Municipal de Lisboa,
K5 International,
PalmStar Media
Capital, TMG
Executive Producers
Oliver Simon
Daniel Baur
Kevin Frakes
Eric Fischer
Cast
Jeremy Irons
Raimund Gregorius,
‘Mundus’
Melanie Laurent
young Estefania
Jack Huston
Amadeu Inacio de
Almeida Prado
Martina Gedeck
Mariana de Eca
Tom Courtenay
older Joao Eca
August Diehl
young Jorge O’ Kelly
Bruno Ganz
older Jorge O’Kelly
Lena Olin
older Estefania
Beatriz Batarda
young Adriana
Marco D’Almeida
young Joao
Christopher Lee
Father Bartholomeu
Charlotte Rampling
older Adriana
Dolby Digital
In Colour
[1.85:1]
Distributor
Bull Dog Film
Distributors
Bern, the present. Professor Raimund Gregorius sees
a young woman about to throw herseif off a bridge
and stops her. She runs away, ieaving behind her
coat and a book by a Portuguese writer; inside the
book is a train ticket to Lisbon. Raimund decides to
use the ticket and reads the book whiie en route to
Lisbon; on his arrivai, he goes iooking for the author,
Amadeu de Prado, but discovers that he died in the
1970s. Raimund is hit by a cyciist and smashes his
giasses, which ieads him to an optician named Mariana,
whose uncie knew Amadeu when young. Amadeu
was a briiiiant student and doctor in the iate 1960s,
during the Saiazar dictatorship; by treating one of the
government’s most vioient henchmen, a man known
as the Butcher of Saiazar, he incurred the wrath of his
community. After being recruited into the resistance by
his friend Jorge, Amadeu became attracted to Jorge’s
girifriend Estefania, who had memorised key names and
addresses of government officiais. Out of a mixture of
jeaiousy and paranoia, Jorge tried to kiii Estefania but
Amadeu saved her and smuggied her out to Spain.
Raimund goes to Spain to meet Estefania, and
aiso meets up with the young woman from the bridge,
who is the Butcher of Saiazar’s granddaughter. She
expresses her guiit over her heritage but says that
she has come to terms with it. Raimund decides to
return home, but Mariana goes to the train station
and suggests that he shouid stay in Lisbon.
Reviewed by Ashley Clark
Perhaps the most notable thing about this
domestic-violence-themed thriller is that its
US release coincided with the emergence
of CCTV footage depicting NLL superstar
Ray Rice knocking his fiancee out cold and
dragging her from an elevator. Concerned
pundits fretted that such a confluence might
harm the film’s chances but they needn’t
have worried: No Good Deed cleaned up at
the US box office, opening at number one.
So what seduced the audience? It can’t have
been the cockamamie, coincidence-strewn
plotting (prison escapee uses his real name?) or
ultra-dubious gender politics (the hunky, virulent
misogynist is consistently framed and shot like
a topless model), but rather the steady stream of
competently directed, heart-in-mouth
moments and the engaging
performances of Idris Elba as the
charming, glowering psycho
and the excellent Taraji P.
Henson as his ever-
resourceful target. No
GoodDeedmdiYhe
terminally silly but
at least it presents a
genuine heroine
instead of the all
too familiar trope
of the damsel in
distress who’s
reliant on male
support. ©
Idris Elba
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Lee Clay
Will Packer
Written by
Aimee Lagos
Director of
Photography
Michael Barrett
Editors
Jim Page
Randy Bricker
Production
Designer
Chris Cornwell
Music
Paul Haslinger
Production Mixer
Mary H. Ellis
Costume Designer
Keith G. Lewis
©Screen Gems, Inc.
Production
Companies
Screen Gems
presents a Will
Packer Productions
production
Executive
Producers
Aimee Lagos
Ellen Goldsmith-Vein
Lindsay Williams
Idris Elba
Taraji P. Henson
Rob Hardy
Glenn S.Gainor
Cast
Idris Elba
Colin Evans
Taraji P. Henson
Terri
Lesiie Bibb
Meg
Kate Dei Castiilo
Alexis
Henry Simmons
Jeffrey
Mirage Spann
Ryan
Kenny Alfonso
Javier
Dolby Digital/
Datasat
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Sony Pictures
Releasing
Tennessee, present day. After failing to gain parole,
prisoner Colin Evans escapes. He visits his ex-
girlfriend Alexis in Atlanta and kills her because she
is in a relationship with another man. He crashes
his car and tricks his way into the house of Terri, a
housewife whose husband Jeffrey is out of town.
There’s a spark of attraction between the pair,
which is interrupted by the arrival of Terri’s friend
Meg, who is suspicious of Colin. Colin kills Meg
and then turns on Terri. He overpowers her and
drives her to the house where he killed Alexis. Colin
reveals that Alexis was having an affair with Jeffrey.
Jeffrey calls Alexis’s phone, which Terri answers;
furious, she tells Jeffrey to call the police. After a
chase, Terri kills Colin. The police and Jeffrey arrive.
Terri moves into a new house, without Jeffrey.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 83
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
The November Man
USA 2014
Director: Roger Donaldson
Certificate 15 107m 55s
Reviewed by Vadim Rizov
“The front line has moved to Belgrade,” CIA
chief John Hanley (Bill Smitrovich) tells former
agent Peter Devereaux (Pierce Brosnan) - which
probably isn’t true as far as contemporary
espionage goes but serves as some kind of cover
for this budget-conscious thriller’s taking place
in Serbia and Montenegro. A very familiar kind
of spy film, The November Man forces Devereaux
back into action to uncover the truth about
unmistakably Putin-esque Russian presidential
candidate Arkady Federov (Lazar Ristovski).
Eluding a predictably indomitable female
Russian assassin (she does ballet stretches to
prep for shootings) and the CIA’s own meddling,
Devereaux gets to the bottom of things while
trying to avenge the death of his ex-wife Natalia.
Brosnan is nastily brutal and contemptuously
efficacious, arguably more Bond-like than his
own Bond, and there’s a goofily commendable
commitment to destroying as many cheap
vehicles as possible in the opening chase,
with such affordable excess reaching self-
parodying heights when a car ploughs into
a truck that is (naturally) conveying a piece
of glass for extra shattering impact.
A veteran hand at making do with inferior
material, director Roger Donaldson keeps events
moving briskly enough, making solid use of
overhead drones to enable bird’s-eye views of
said car chase - about the only technological
indication that this wasn’t made 20 years ago. ©
Credits and Synopsis
The Possibilities Are Endless
United Kingdom 2014
Directors: Edward Lovelace, James Hall
Certificate 12A 83m 26s
Produced by
Beau St Clair
Sriram Das
Screenplay
Michael Finch
Karl Gajdusek
Based on the book
There Are No Spies
by Bill Granger
Director of
Photography
Romain Lacourbas
Editor
John Gilbert
Production
Designer
Kevin Kavanaugh
Music
Marco Beltrami
Sound Mixer
Stephane Bucher
Costume Designer
Bojana Nikitovic
©No Spies, LLC
Production
Companies
Relativity Media
presents an Irish
DreamTime andSPD
Films production
in association
with The Solution
Entertainment
Group, PalmStar
Media Capital
and Merced
Media Partners
A Roger
Donaldson film
Executive
Producers
Kevin Frakes
Pierce Brosnan
Lisa Wilson
Myles Nestel
Raj Brinder Singh
Stuart Brown
Mike Sullivan
Ryan Kavanaugh
Tucker Tooley
D. Constantine Conte
KevanVan
Thompson
Alan Pao
Corey Large
Ankur Rungta
Vishal Rungta
Scott Fischer
Remington Chase
Grant Cramer
Stepan Martirosyan
Cast
Pierce Brosnan
Peter Devereaux
Luke Bracey
David Mason
Oiga Kurylenko
Alice Fournier
Eliza Taylor
Sarah
Caterina Scorsone
Celia
Bill Smitrovich
John Hanley
William Patton
Perry Weinstein
Lazar Ristovski
Arkady Federov
Mediha Musliovic
Natalia Ulanova
Nina Mrda
Mira Filipova
(15 years)
Dolby Digital
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Buena Vista
International (UK)
Six years after leaving the CIA, Peter Devereaux
is recruited by former boss John Hanley to get
agent Natalia Ulanova - Peter’s ex-wife - out of
Russia, where she has been working undercover,
posing as an aide to presidential candidate Arkady
Federov. After Natalia is killed by a CIA team led
by his former partner, Peter travels to Belgrade
to find Mira Filipova, whom Natalia had identified
as important. Eluding both the CIA and Federov’s
assassin, Peter discovers that Hanley and Federov
have been conspiring to start a Russian war against
Chechnya. Leaving Hanley to the authorities,
Peter flees with Mira to start a new life.
Melody maker: Edwyn Collins
Reviewed by Trevor Johnston
Did the projector bulb just go pop? Moments
after we see archive US TV footage of Edwyn
Collins performing live and effortlessly charming
late-night network host Conan O’Brien, the
screen turns such a Stygian blank that one
suspects a major technical meltdown. When
images of the cosmos emerge from the darkness,
however, it turns out that this is just one of
the distinctive stylistic choices making James
Hall and Edward Lovelace’s portrait of Collins
a highly unusual item among the otherwise
familiar contours of music documentaries.
While the film in due course observes its
subject at home and in the studio, that opening
moment of sensory dropout highlights its
atypical attempt to render the interior experience
of an artist who is best known these days for his
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Editor
Supervising
Production
Beadie Finzi
Thomas Benski
David Charap
Sound Editor/
Companies
Maxyne Franklin
Lucas Ochoa
Music & Original
Sound Designer
Pulse Films presents
Jess Search
Julia Nottingham
Score
Christopher Barnett
in association with
Sam Sniderman
Director of
Edwyn Collins
Britdoc Circle and
Lucy Cohen
Photography
Carwyn Ellis
©Pulse Films
Ingenious Media
Richard Stewart
Sebastian Lewsley
SPV3 Limited
Executive Producers
Doiby Digitai
This documentary portrait of Edwyn Collins shows
the former Orange Juice frontman and solo artist
recovering from the serious cerebral haemorrhage he
suffered in 2005. After coming out of a coma, Collins
had restricted movement on his right side, and brain
damage seriously affected his memory and powers
of speech. As he rediscovers his sense of self, the
only phrases he can form are “Grace Maxwell”, the
name of his wife, and “the possibilities are endless”.
His recovery brings potent recollections of
childhood holidays in Helmsdale in Scotland
(where he and Grace have a second home), and a
heroic recovery from a serious stroke in 2005. The
aforementioned audiovisual caesura offers a fairly
straightforward representation of the moment
when a cerebral haemorrhage changed Collins’s
life for ever, but the lengthy sequence which
follows, strikingly conceived and assembled,
keenly portrays the primal swirl of memory that
assailed Collins while he lay in a coma afterwards.
Foremost in his mind looms the Scottish coastal
community of Helmsdale, scene of many a
childhood highland holiday, here evoked in a
mood of emotionally charged recollection that’s
more Terence Davies than Alex Gibney. The
montage is underlaid by voiceover from Collins
and his wife Grace Maxwell filling in the details
of his fight for life, yet the abiding impression is
definitely more reverie than reportage.
Most unexpectedly, it’s a fair while
In Colour
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Pulse Films
realisation of the fundamental place that music-
making has in his life. Although his speech remains
slightly faltering, his singing voice proves as
strong as ever, and a return to his studios prompts
new recordings; live performances follow.
Interwoven among this observational material
is footage of a young man whose formative
experiences of romance and music seem to
mirror Collins’s own early inspirations; he is later
revealed to be Edwyn and Grace’s son Will.
Edwyn and Grace contemplate a move from London
to Helmsdale, facing the future in a positive light.
84 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
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REVIEWS
© before we even see the post-haemorrhage
Collins, just about able to reflect on
reconstructing his sense of self during his ongoing
recuperation. He was stricken by aphasia, and
the handful of words he could initially shape
included his wife’s name and the key phrase “the
possibilities are endless” - which, Grace recalls in
loving yet jaundiced tones, lost its idealistic lustre
after she’d heard it 8o times a day After more than
three decades together, they’re quite a double
act, these two, and while Hall and Lovelace’s
film impresses for its formal endeavour, its
judiciously restrained observational coverage
also leaves us moved - by Collins’s passionate
determination not to relinquish the music-
making that’s always defined him, and by the
life-affirming mutual devotion that has sustained
husband and wife through thick and thin. Playing
live, for instance, she strums the guitar while
he picks out the chords with his working left
hand - and there can surely be few rock docs
where the undoubted highlight is the missus
affectionately clipping the star’s fingernails.
As we see the older, greyer, rounder Edwyn
shuffling along with his gammy right foot, in
marked contrast to the dashing figure he cut in
his 1980s pomp, when his band Orange Juice
admirably reconciled indie cool with insouciant
fun, there’s a total absence of vanity on display.
This signals an obvious level of trust on Collins’s
part, and the filmmakers repay that trust by
never cheapening what he and Grace have been
through or overplaying it for blatant button-
pushing effect. The film’s directorial finesse and
imagination bring insight to an already affecting
true story, primarily because Hall and Lovelace
are more interested in the universal resonance
of finding peace through self-acceptance than
in foregrounding the terrifying specifics of
Collins’s medical travails. Their approach
isn’t as thoroughly journalistic as that of the
exemplary Jason Becker: Not Dead Yet (2012), for
instance, and those with only a vague notion
of Collins’s pop pedigree might find the film
slightly light on biographical ballast, but it’s
really refreshing to see relatively new filmmakers
(the duo’s only previous directorial credit being
a low-profile US indie music survey. Werewolves
Across America) shaping the doc form with a
confidence born of a deep faith in their material.
From the Helmsdale evocation in the opening
reel, where thumbnail sketches of a seagoing
fisherman and his patient spouse cannily
foreshadow the dynamic of the central couple,
to a subsequent strand tracing the formative
influence of music and romance on a young man
today (his identity is a delightful reveal), the film
transcends any narrow observational remit, its
resonant images and telling metaphors making
the end result so much richer. In Collins we find
someone who spent the earlier part of his career
chasing and eventually bagging that elusive
hit single, yet his seeming ill fortune brings a
kind of serenity - he is at ease with himself and
hence ‘home again’, as the signature song of
his later years makes clear. Leaving Edwyn and
Grace under clear skies on Helmsdale beach,
the film fades out on an exquisite grace note,
drawing this chapter to a close, yet hearteningly
suggesting so much more to come. ©
The Remaining
USA 2014
Director: Casey La Scala
Certificate 15 88m 12s
The Rewrite
USA 2014
Director: Marc Lawrence
Reviewed Mar Diestro-Dopido
According to Casey La Scala’s horror film
The Remaining, the dramatic unfolding of the
Rapture (as foretold by biblical prophecies) will
cause all true believers to be unceremoniously
removed to heaven after experiencing sudden
death, leaving everyone else in a degenerated
hell on earth, facing a severe test of their faith
and a reckoning of their lives. It all starts with
protagonists Skylar and Dan tying the knot
in a hotel instead of a church. Stylistically
and thematically. Left Behind, Cloverfieldand
Paranormal Activity- and an opening sequence
that recalls [RECJg: Genesis -dll loom large,
as La Scala (best known for producing Donnie
Darko) presses fast-forward on his characters’
desperate search for salvation and redemption.
There’s no ambiguity, double-meaning or
‘doubt’ here, no wondering if the events are
actual or the projection of troubled minds. It’s all
simply a question of faith, with La Scala sticking
doggedly to the most straightforward reading of
events and making a small-budget disaster film/
supernatural thriller that proceeds by shocks
and jolts rather than what originally seemed a
well-intentioned if simplistic spiritual search. ©
Revelations: Johnny Pacar, Liz E. Morgan
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Costume Designer
Jack
Brad Luff
Carol Cutshall
Johnny Pacar
Marc Bienstock
Tommy
Casey La Scala
©Affirm Films
italia Ricci
Screenplay
Production
Allison
Casey La Scala
Companies
Bryan Dechart
Chris Dowling
Affirm Films
Dan
Story
presents a Cinematic
Liz E. Morgan
Casey La Scala
production in
Sam
Director of
association with
John Pyper-
Photography
Sunrise Pictures
Ferguson
Doug Emmett
and Baron Films
Pastor Shay
Editor
A Casey La Scala film
Paul Covington
Executive Producer
In Colour
Production
Peter Schafer
[1.85:1]
Designer
Brian Stultz
Distributor
Music
Cast
Miracle
Nathan Whitehead
AlexaVega
Communications
Sound Mixer
Skylar
Jonathan Gaynor
Shaun Sipos
US, the present. Lapsed Catholics Skylar and Dan
are getting married in a hotel when people around
them suddenly start dropping dead. With their close
friends, Skylar and Dan escape from a series of
Judgement Day occurrences. They seek shelter in a
church, where the priest tells them that believers in
God have been taken up to heaven, an event known
in the Bible as the Rapture; everyone else is left
behind in a hellish version of earth. The priest - who
has regained his faith - tries to save them but
he dies. One by one, Skylar, Dan and their friends
recover their faith, only to each die a violent death:
in the wake of the Rapture, demons are attempting
to exterminate all trace of faith from the earth.
Reviewed by Roger Clarke
Writer/director Marc Lawrence has become a
veritable Hugh Grant moviemaking machine
- he and the actor have done Two Weeks Notice
(2002), Music and Lyrics (2007) and Did You
Hear About the Morgans? (2oog) together. Now,
in their fourth outing. Grant plays a version
of Lawrence himself - a screenwriter who’s
unable to replicate an early success and who
reluctantly takes a job, at the behest of his agent,
as a creative-writing tutor at a drab East Coast
college very far from sunny Hollywood. Grant’s
Keith Michaels arrives there with a sense of
desolation - and immediately jeopardises his
position by sleeping with a future student, whom
he picks up in a Wendy’s hamburger joint.
Academic life is fairly well represented, with
an amusing caricature from The West Win^s
Allison Janney as Mary Weldon, a spinster of
a certain age and type, a votary at the shrine of
Jane Austen. Luckily, Keith also meets feisty
and much more ‘appropriate’ love interest
Holly (Marisa Tomei), a mature student who
encourages him to be more positive and to
reach out to his estranged 1 8-year-old son.
But Mary has it in for him and seems set on
ensuring that he’s sacked for sexual misconduct
and for being, well, just rather annoying.
Lawrence has done very little to conceal the
quite obviously autobiographical nature of his
film - indeed, he’s even set it in Binghamton
University, where he himself taught creative
writing and where he was a student (though this
part is not in The Rewrite), graduating in 1981.
He is best known for writing Miss Congeniality
(2000), which is perhaps translated here into
Keith’s fictional hit Paradise Misplaced -Keith is
plagued by glowing references to it by everyone
from movie executives to airport security guards.
Keith feels a failure, washed up, coasting
on past triumphs; it’s a job description that
Grant must by now have on his business card,
the kind of role he’s rather good at. But unlike
many Grant movies of recent years - and yes,
this is a caramel-centred redemption story -
there are some interesting points raised along
the way, most specifically about whether or
not art can be taught. Grant’s story arc means
that he changes his mind on the matter and
this somehow makes him a better person. He
Scene it all: Hugh Grant
86 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Say When
USA 2014
Director: Lynn Shelton
Certificate 15 99m 15s
is unexpectedly delighted and recharged by
the business of teaching the young; indeed,
it is this central realisation that allows even
the curmudgeonly Mary to forgive his (quite
serious) trespass. It’s not a story about a failed
writer: The Rewrite is a love letter to teaching.
‘I like being a teacher,’ Grant’s character says at
an early stage in the film where he’s already slept
with a student, a grubby business, and it’s kind
of funny for a while, and then becomes rather
reprehensible. When selecting his students from a
pile of their scripts, he doesn’t bother to read their
work, he simply goes on the campus website and
selects the girls he finds attractive and a couple
of token ugly boys. As it happens both these boys
perform key functions in his development from
Hollywood cad to refined soul; one kid, obsessed
with Star Wars, takes his advice about broadening
his horizons and gets into such serious trouble
he’s hospitalised. Another male student comes
up with such a good script he gives it to his
own agent to sell, and selflessly chaperones
him to a meeting of the very studio sharks who
have been turning him down for years. What
he discovers is that words have consequences,
an odd lesson, you would have thought, for a
professional writer to learn, but learn it he does.
He learns to regret his glibness and slickness,
his Hollywood patter, and so finds absolution.
Some of Grant’s lines are really quite good,
zingy and seemingly spontaneous. There are
serious moves afoot to rehabilitate Grant as
an actor, and his turn here, narcissistic and
self-pitying and yet at the same time lively
and winning, is not a bad place to start. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Companies
MarisaTomei
Liz Glotzer
A Castle Rock
Holly Carpenter
Martin Shafer
Entertainment,
Bella Heathcote
Written by
Reserve Room
Karen Gabney
Marc Lawrence
Productions
J.K. Simmons
Director of
production
Dr Hal Lerner
Photography
With the support
Chris Elliott
Jonathan Brown
of the New York
Professor Jim Harper
Editor
State Governor's
Allison Janney
Ken Eluto
Office for Motion
Professor Mary
Production
Picture & Television
Weldon
Designer
Development
Ola Maslik
Executive Producer
Dolby Digital
Music
David Koplan
In Colour
Clyde Lawrence
Film Extracts
[2.35:1]
Sound Mixer
Dirty Dancing (1987)
Tom Nelson
Marty (1954)
Distributor
Costume Designer
Gary Jones
12 Angry Men (1956)
LionsgateUK
©Professor
Cast
Productions, LLC
Hugh Grant
Production
Keith Michaels
Los Angeles, present day. Keith Michaels, a
screenwriter who wrote a hit film over a decade
ago, is desperately trying to sell a new script to the
studios, but without success. Running out of money,
he accepts a job as a teacher of creative writing
at Binghamton University in Upstate New York.
Before he even starts teaching, he breaks college
rules by sleeping with a student. Some members
of staff dislike Keith’s populist approach. Keith
insists that writing can’t be taught, but mature
student Holly disagrees with him. Unexpectedly,
Keith’s talent for teaching blossoms. However, he
faces disciplinary action and possible dismissal
because of his earlier liaison with the student. He
realises that he loves teaching - and that he has
fallen for Holly. He charms his way out of trouble.
Reviewed Thirza Wakefield
Like her last film but one - the fun and touching
Your Sister’s Sister (2011)- director Lynn Shelton’s
sixth feature is set in her hometown of Seattle
and is, again, about putting the brakes on life
to get some needed perspective. In the former,
the withdrawal of Mark Duplass’s Jack to an
island retreat is complicated by the arrival of its
lender-sisters and an accidental love triangle; in
Say When, it’s the sisterly relationship formed
between two strangers that provides the
protagonist with the way out she’s been wanting.
Megan (Keira Knightley), in her late twenties,
is educated to post-degree level and lives with
her long-term boyfriend Anthony; she responds
to his pressure to take a personality test with
flighty insouciance: “The type that I am is a
procrastinator.” Dodging career counselling,
she’s content to be doing odd jobs for her doting,
enabler dad, and it’s not until Anthony proposes
that she concedes she should consider her future.
But when she meets the underage Annika at a
bargain grocery store and agrees to buy alcohol for
her, Megan asks a favour in return: can she lay low
at Annika’s house for a week, no questions asked?
Say When (released as Laggies in the US) isn’t
the typical commitment-phobe drama, because
Megan doesn’t act like a typical person - as
Annika’s single father Craig (Sam Rockwell) is
quick to point out. A grown woman hanging
out with a pubescent kid is odd however
you look at it, but as someone who knows
firsthand how time can pass by undetected - he
divides his own life into “best gorgeousness”
(senior year), “taffeta” (a wedding) and “then
there was a kid” - Craig is sympathetic.
The film’s conceit is a solid one: there is
an umbilical connection between marriage
proposal and forward projections made in
high school. Annika’s first crush and Megan’s
engagement are corresponding markers, and
there’s not much to tell the girls apart in terms of
temperament. Megan easily slips back into the
teenage mindset, piercing ears at a party, happy
to hang around in pyjamas, which she covers
1 Credits and Synopsis
Producers
The Solution
JeffGarlin
Myles Nestel
Entertainment
Ed
Kevin Frakes
Group presents
Ellie Kemper
Raj Brinder Singh
in association with
Allison
Produced by
Merced Media
Mark Webber
Steve Golin
Partners, Palmstar
Anthony
AlixMadigan-Yorkin
Media Capital and
Daniel Zovatto
Rosalie Swedlin
Penlife Media
Junior
Written by
Afilm by Lynn Shelton
Andrea Seigel
Executive Producers
In Colour
Director of
Lisa Wilson
[1.85:1]
Photography
Craig Chapman
Benjamin Kasulke
Ankur Rungta
Distributor
Edited by
Vishal Rungta
Icon Film Distribution
Nat Sanders
Shawn Simpson
Production Designer
Gordon Bijelonic
US theatrical title
John Lavin
Paul Green
Laggies
Music
Benjamin Gibbard
Jennifer Roth
Production
Sound Mixer
CAST
Kelsey Wood
Keira Knightley
Costume Designer
Megan
Ronald Leamon
Chloe Grace Moretz
Annika
©Laggies Fund, LLC
Sam Rockwell
Production
Craig
Companies
Kaitlyn Dever
Anonymous Content,
Misty
Time’s arrow: Keira Knightley
with only a coat to go drinking with Craig at
a Mexican restaurant. There is no instruction
manual for living through one’s twenties, and
Megan embodies the personality put to sleep
by the surprising non-eventfulness of those
billed-as-crucial years, the transition between
adolescence and adulthood, which can feel not at
all like change but stagnation, torpor, entropy.
Knightley’s earlier performances have
been vexed by what appeared to be a nervous
disposition. Perhaps a by-product of the roles
she was offered in younger years, she has
had a tendency to look both self-satisfied and
pained - an off-putting mix. Here, however, she
manages to set aside that trademark tightness,
possibly because she’s working with a female
director, herself an actor. In the period-costume
parts that she’s steadily pulling away from,
Knightley has been constricted to meet very
clear character beats, but Say When’s more
equivocal emotional trajectory gives her her
breath back. Shelton’s two-camera coverage
suits her. The script by first-timer Andrea Seigel
is ungainly in places, and Shelton countersigns
its pat lessons. “Suck it up and go with your gut”
sounds prosaic for a sign-off resolution but - to
give the film its due - this is how people speak. ©
Seattle, present day. Though highly educated,
28-year-old Megan is happily purposeless. She
works part-time for her adoring father and lives with
high-school sweetheart Anthony. At the wedding of
mutual friends, Anthony proposes. That night, Megan
buys alcohol for 16-year-old Annika and gets drunk
with her and her friends. When Anthony renews his
proposal the next morning, Megan weakly accepts
and they decide to elope to Las Vegas. Megan lies to
Anthony about signing up for a personal development
seminar and instead holes up at Annika’s house for
the week. Annika’s single father Craig, a divorce
lawyer, is initially disconcerted by his daughter’s new
friendship but he and Megan soon get along and, after
a night’s drinking, sleep together. Annika accepts
their relationship but is angry when she discovers
that Megan is engaged. When Megan is arrested for
drink-driving, covering up for one of Annika’s friends,
Craig offers his services as a lawyer. Megan tells him
the truth about Anthony and he leaves, wounded. At
the airport with Anthony, Megan realises that she has
fallen out of love with him and they go their separate
ways. She makes up with Annika at Annika’s prom, and
asks Craig’s forgiveness on his doorstep. He lets her in.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 87
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Serena
USA/Czech Republic 2014
Director: Susanne Bier
Certificate 15 109m 34s
Reviewed by Kate Stables
Since Susanne Bier made her name with a string
of stirring melodramas (including 2010’s Oscar-
winning In a Better World), she must have seemed
a fine fit to bring Ron Rash’s dark Depression tale
of North Carolina timber tussles and empire-
hungry hubris to the screen. It’s a big stretch,
however, from principled Danes in family crisis
to the backwoods machinations and murder plots
of newlyweds George and Serena Pemberton,
wrestling with tainted love and the threat of a
National Park buyout. Bier’s film is high, wide
and handsome, making misty Czech forests
the uncanny double of logging-scarred Smoky
Mountain hillsides. But it never finds the dramatic
tone that will allow it to become the Cold
Mountain-sXylt period romance it’s aiming for.
The chief stumbling block is the ambitious mix
of elements, since the story of the Pembertons’
doomed marriage and stillborn timber dynasty
is a curious mixture of tragedy and romance. Its
plot centres on the type of early-20th-century
empire-building last seen in There Will Be
Blood, as the central couple rapidly become the
Macbeths of the Appalachian logging industry.
Jennifer Lawrence’s ruthless Serena, who proves
equally deadly towards rattlesnakes, double-
crossers and innocent toddlers,
also adds a strong streak of noir
menace to the proceedings.
Bier infuses this melodrama
mash-up with an Old
Hollywood feel, fixing Lawrence
and co-star Bradley Cooper in
frequent starry close-ups, as
George stares manfully at the
horizon or Serena’s jaw clenches
meaningfully. Despite the
authentically 1929 costuming
and design (Lawrence’s
seductive silk clothes signal
dangerous allure among
Timber queen: Jennifer Lawrence
Credits and Synopsis
the forest greys and browns), there’s a 1940s
whiff about the film, thanks to its unabashedly
‘women’s noir’ themes and Lawrence’s Barbara
Stanwyck-style toughness. Serena’s determined
pale-blue eyes, unhinged marital love and
evil, single-focus pragmatism also bring to
mind Gene Tierney’s killer-wife in Leave Her to
Heaven (1945). Equipped with a trained eagle
and Rhys Ifan’s dour, honour-bound assassin,
Lawrence makes Serena a truly fatal femme.
She’s the most accomplished feature of a
film that can’t find a cinematic equivalent
for the spare, elliptical prose of Rash’s novel.
Even though Bier keeps both visuals and
performances restrained, the film still clunks
noticeably through its operatic narrative and
Christopher Kyle’s stilted, grandiose dialogue.
Cooper, trying his hand at a bluff, outdoorsy
performance, isn’t a great fit here. His accent
wanders freely either side of the Mason-
Dixon line, chiming oddly with the hillbilly
inflection of Toby Jones’s splenetic sheriff.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing about the
film is its ambivalence when pitting Nature
against rugged American individualism. Bier’s
camera lingers on the lushly forested mountain
ranges and shows the bloodsoaked human
cost of the timber trade. Clean landscapes and
dirty business are laboriously contrasted, as
George pays off a senator and bumps off his
partner. Yet his rousing rebuttal to the National
Park promoters (“Ereedom! That’s what this
country is supposed to be about!”) has an almost
Ayn Rand fervour, and gets an enthusiastic
reception from the work-hungry townspeople.
Bier’s film wants our sympathy for its grasping
lovers, insisting that the death of their dynastic
dream tips Serena into madness and
f George into self-sacrifice. Had it
had the nerve to underline the
fact that both Pembertons are
predators - destroying land and
people alike - it would have been a
more vivid and satisfying piece. ©
Producers
NickWechsler
Susanne Bier
Steve Schwartz
Paula Mae Schwartz
Todd Wagner
Ron Halpern
Ben Cosgrove
Written by
Christopher Kyle
Based on the book
by Ron Rash
Director of
Photography
Morten Soborg
Editors
Mat Newman
Pernille Bech
Christensen
Production Designer
Richard Bridgland
Music
Johan Soderqvist
Sound Mixer
Tomas Belohradsky
Costume Designer
SigneSejIund
©Serena (U.S.)
Productions LLC
Production
Companies
StudioCanal and
2929 Productions
present in association
with Anton Capital
Entertainment, S.C.A.
A NickWechsler
and Chockstone
Pictures production
A Susanne Bier film
Co-producer:
Sirena Film
Supported by the
Czech Republic
through the State
Cinematography
Fund under the
Film Incentives
Programme
Executive Producers
Peter McAleese
Mark Cuban
Olivier Courson
Cast
Bradiey Cooper
George Pemberton
Jennifer Lawrence
Serena Pemberton
Rhys Ifans
Galloway
Toby Jones
Sheriff McDowell
David Dencik
Buchanan
Sean Harris
Campbell
Ana Ularu
Rachel Hermann
Sam Reid
Vaughn
ConiethHiil
Doctor Chaney
Douglas Hodge
Horace Kephart
Kim Bodnia
Abe Hermann
Christian McKay
Boston bank manager
Doiby Digital/DTS
in Coiour
[ ]
Distributor
Studiocanal Limited
North Carolina, 1929. Timber-camp owner George
Pemberton brings his tough, orphaned bride Serena
home after a whirlwind courtship. He discovers that
his business partner Buchanan secretly sides with
local interests seeking their land for a National Park.
George kills him, partly in self-defence, during a
bear hunt. Heavily pregnant, Serena saves the life of
employee Galloway in an accident, but miscarries,
and is then infertile. Galloway pledges himself to
her. Foreman Campbell discovers that the company
is failing. He tells the sheriff that George killed
Buchanan. Galloway kills Campbell before he can
testify. Serena, jealous of Jacob, the baby fathered
by George with serving-girl Rachel, sends Galloway
to kill mother and child, but the sheriff has relocated
them. Alerted to Serena’s plan, George assaults and
abandons her. George confesses to Buchanan’s murder
to the sheriff and discovers Rachel’s whereabouts.
Galloway, chased by George, finds Rachel and Jacob
hiding on a train leaving town. George kills Galloway
during a struggle, and sends Rachel and Jacob away
for safety. George wounds a panther that he had been
hunting for months in the forest. It springs on him,
and they die together. After seeing George’s corpse,
a despairing Serena sets fire to the timber camp.
Set Fire to the Stars
United Kingdom 2014
Director: Andy Goddard
Certificate 15 96m 47s
Reviewed Anton Bitel
“Paradise!” declares Dylan Thomas (Celyn
Jones) as he enters a diner in Eairfield County,
Connecticut. “That’s one word for it,” says his
more sceptical companion, John Malcolm
Brinnin (Elijah Wood). Here there appears to be
more than one word for everything. Waitress
Rosie (Maimie McCoy) effortlessly converts
customers’ orders into an unintelligible stream
of diner lingo (“Two chicks on a raft, wreck
’em”), yet is puzzled by Brinnin’s description of
himself as Thomas’s “Boswell, his amanuensis”
(“You must be a poet, you speak funny”), and
misconstrues his assertion that Thomas is from
Wales as a Moby-Dickrdtrmct (unaware that
earlier Brinnin has been referred to as the “man to
captain this ship” and “Ahab”). Yet while Thomas
maybe a “strange little foreign man” in a foreign
land, he is keen and quick to assimilate, and is
soon happily sharing a drink, hard-luck stories
and Ham/ef quotes with a stranger (Richard
Brake). There is resonant poetry everywhere here
for those, like Thomas, who will lend their ear.
Local boy Brinnin, however, remains aloof and
isolated, sitting apart and so out of tune with his
own people that he fails to understand a direct
proposition from Rosie to meet after work.
Very loosely expanded from the first 30 or
so pages of the real Brinnin’s 1955 book Dylan
Thomas in America, and overlapping to a degree
with the recent BBC drama A Poet in New York,
Set Fire to the Stars is the feature debut of regular
TV director Andy Goddard (who co-wrote with
Jones). Set in the winter of 1950, it is a study in
words and character, as Brinnin, recently granted
a poetry professorship and brimming with
ambition, finds himself playing “benefactor,
babysitter, nursemaid” to “the purest lyrical
poet in the English-speaking world” on his first
tour of America - and freefalling in the orbit
of an unfathomably talented wordsmith on a
self-destructive binge. What follows is a clash
of Apollonian and Dionysian poetics: where
bookish Brinnin wishes to reduce Thomas’s work
to theory, labelling and analysis, for Thomas
poetry comes from a surrender to the emotions
(and booze), from the ambiguous slippage of
words, and from an engagement with life beyond
the ivory tower. Where Brinnin places marks
Burning bridges: Celyn Jones, Elijah Wood
88 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
and critiques against his students’ work, the
impassioned words of a letter from Thomas’s
wife Caitlin conjure for him (and for us too) a
living, breathing muse (Kelly Reilly) to be loved
and feared. These two men of letters relate to
poetry - and the world - in very different ways,
yet find a common language of friendship,
even if Brinnin, in his final conversation with
Thomas, is uncharacteristically lost for words.
This melancholic, monochrome vision of
Truman-era East Coast America has all been
beautifully recreated in Wales (in furtherance
of the film’s themes of US-Welsh exchange).
The paradise of the ‘Connecticut’ countryside
contrasts with the New York towerscapes, here
rendered in stylised CGI, like a snowglobe Sin
City (which also featured Wood). Thomas would
succumb to their fatal temptations, and his
own demons, in 1953 - but Set Fire to the Stars
is equally concerned with Brinnin’s difficult
emergence from the stuffy, gated gardens of
academe into the messier reality outside. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
AJ Riach
Andy Evans
Screenplay
Andy Goddard
Celyn Jones
Director of
Photography
Chris Seager
Editor
Mike Jones
Production
Designer
Edward Thomas
Music
Gruff Rhys
Sound Mixer
Bryn Thomas
Costume Designer
Francisco
Rodriguez-Weil
©Mad As Birds
Limited
Production
Companies
The Works presents
a Mad As Birds film in
association with YJB
Films, Masnomisand
Ffilm Cymru Wales
Supported by Ffilm
Cymru Wales,
National Lottery
through the Arts
Council of Wales
Executive Producer
Steve Clark-Hall
Cast
Elijah Wood
John Malcolm
Brinnin
Celyn Jones
Dylan Thomas
Steven Mackintosh
Jack
Kevin Eldon
Stanley
Maimie McCoy
Rosie
Steve Speirs
Mickey
Richard Brake
Mr Unlucky
Shirley Henderson
Shirley
Kelly Reilly
Caitlin Thomas
Dolby Digital
In Black and White
[2.35:1]
Distributor
Munro Film Services
New York, 1950. Sponsored by his colleague Jack,
young, newly appointed professor of poetry John
Malcolm Brinnin receives a grant to bring over
his hero Dylan Thomas on his first reading tour of
America. He is warned that a failure to keep the
Welsh poet’s notorious rabble-rousing under control
will cost him his career. When the already ailing
Thomas proves unable to resist the temptations
of New York’s bars and parties, Brinnin drives him
to his family’s riverside cabin in Connecticut to
recover before a crucial appearance at Jack’s alma
mater, Yale. Thomas gradually befriends Brinnin as
they share experiences and discuss poetry. Married
neighbours (and writers) Shirley and Stanley come
over for a night of boxing, storytelling and adultery.
On the eve of his Yale appearance, Thomas drinks
himself into a stupor - and then, after a decent
recital, insults the senior academics over dinner.
Jack informs Brinnin that his professorship is over.
Feeling betrayed, Brinnin insists that Thomas finally
read the letter from his wife Caitlin that he has
thus far studiously left unopened (and tried several
times to lose). Galvanised by the impassioned
letter, Thomas completes the tour with renewed
vigour so that he can return home to his family.
The Skeleton Twins
USA 2014
Director: Craig Johnson
Certificate 15 92m 52s
Reviewed by Thirza Wakefield
Writer-director Craig Johnson’s
second feature, about a sibling
friendship gone to seed, has
much in common with Kenneth
Lonergan’s You Can Count on Me
(2000). Lonergan’s drama, starring Laura Linney
and a fresh-faced Mark Ruffalo on the lip of indie
fame, brought brother and sister together under
one roof and observed the vicissitudes of their
relationship. Poor at communicating after intervals
apart and having chosen different paths in life,
they lacked direction after losing their parents
in childhood. Johnson’s siblings Maggie (Kristen
Wiig) and Milo (Bill Hader) are similarly out of
the habit of closeness after ten years at opposite
ends of America: Milo is a luckless actor in LA,
Maggie is still in their hometown in upstate New
York. Milo moves in with Maggie after trying
and failing to commit suicide - an act that is
hardly a fast-pass to rapprochement, since their
father killed himself when they were young.
Watching Lonergan’s film, one witnessed
first-hand and judged for oneself the protagonists’
behaviour. It felt unformulaic and surprising.
But The Skeleton Twins is all ricochet, the events
(or non-events) of Johnson’s script the upshot
of a priori actions and established patterns of
conduct: drinking, concealment, depression.
Maggie and Milo’s father’s death, the formative
love affair between a 1 5-year-old Milo and his
college teacher Rich, the prologue to his attempted
suicide - all this is off screen and inferential. Milo’s
onscreen peregrination from morbid to more
positive thinking is conversion by conversation,
like therapy - and the same is true of the truce
he reaches with his stymied, life-shy sister.
Given that it’s the talk that does all the talking,
it’s some reassurance that Johnson’s dialogue -
padded with ad libbing by Hader and Wiig, who are
improvisational royalty, wet-nursed at the breast
of Saturday Night Live -is credible and interesting.
Hader is superb as the gay Milo, still holding a
torch for Rich, their deemed-indecent affair of a
decade ago determinative and unshakeable. In drag
for Halloween or deadpan at a bar on ‘dyke night’.
Funny bone: Luke Wilson
Hader is always thoroughly believable. Regarding
himself in a full-length mirror, he laments, “I have
a body like a frog,” managing, in his delivery, both
humour and a piteous humility The camera loves
him - something that hasn’t so far been visible
in the Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen-scripted
comedies he’s frequented in minor roles since the
mid-2ooos. That he’s only just beginning to appear
in non-comedic, non-conventional films - starting
with the triptych The Disappearance of Eleanor
Rigby -is mystifying and cause for excitement.
Until firmly established and trusted to engage
an audience with other than horseplay, Hader
will straddle the divide, as here. The Skeleton
Twins is tonally indecisive - possibly as a result
of Johnson being in thrall to his cast’s comedic
abilities. It’s a film of close-ups and medium
shots, its mise en scene nondescript until tailored
for a lip-synching set piece, shot and lit like a
music video. An enjoyable let-up it is -but it
looks like the director’s taking his lead from the
talent rather than the other way around. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Belladonna
Billy
Stephanie Langhoff
Productions
Joanna Gleason
Jennifer Lee
This film was
Judy
Jacob Pechenik
supported by the
Kathleen Rose
Written by
Sundance Institute
Perkins
Craig Johnson
Feature Film Program
Carlie
Mark Heyman
Filmed with the
Adriane Lenox
Director of
support of the New
Dr Linda Essex
Photography
York State Governor’s
Reed Morano
Office for Motion
Dolby Digital
Editor
Picture & Television
In Colour
Jennifer Lee
Development
[2.35:1]
Production Designer
Executive Producers
Ola Maslik
Mark Duplass
Distributor
Music
Jay Duplass
Sony Pictures
Nathan Larson
Jared Ian Goldman
Releasing
Sound Mixer
Anton Gold
Costume Designer
Cast
KaelaWohl
Bill Hader
©Skeleton Twins LLC
Milo Dean
Kristen Wiig
Production
Maggie Dean
Companies
Luke Wilson
A Duplass Brothers
Lance
production
Ty Burrell
A Venture Forth
Rich
production
Boyd Holbrook
US, present day. After unsuccessfully attempting
suicide, out-of-work actor Milo leaves LA and moves
in with his married sister Maggie in their hometown
in upstate New York. The siblings’ father committed
suicide when they were adolescents, and their mother
subsequently moved away to Arizona. Maggie and
her husband Lance are supposedly trying for a baby,
but Maggie is secretly taking contraceptive pills.
Milo tries to reconnect with his college teacher Rich,
with whom he had a sexual liaison at 15. Maggie
takes scuba-diving classes and has sex with her
instructor. The siblings bond, gradually restoring
their previously close and confiding relationship. Milo
spends the night with Rich, who now has a teenage
son and girlfriend. On Halloween, Maggie is angry
to learn of Milo’s rendezvous with Rich - she was
the person who exposed their earlier relationship,
causing Rich to lose his job. Milo tips off Lance about
Maggie’s use of contraceptives; the siblings argue
viciously when Maggie finds out. Milo leaves New
York. Later, intuiting Maggie’s intentions from a
voicemail, he returns to rescue her from suicide by
drowning. The two make up and buy goldfish for Milo.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 89
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
Stations of the Cross
Germany/France 2014
Director: Dietrich Bruggemann
Reviewed Hannah McGill
Spoiler alert: this review
1 reveals a plot twist
' “Can you like both rock and
Bach chorales?” For the 14-year-
old protagonist of Stations of the
Cross, this is a solemn question, and one to which
she sincerely seeks an answer. Since she loves
her mother and believes in God, Maria (Lea van
Acken) wants to emulate her mother’s unbending
commitment to their church. Possessed, however,
of the unclouded logic of a child, she finds it
hard to accept that so many others, among them
her music-loving schoolmate Christian, can be
living steeped in sin; or that her own yearnings,
including her wish to be close to Christian, are
inherently sinful. It takes a longer lifetime of self-
indoctrination, like that of her mother (Franziska
Weisz), to think that way, and some harsh or
evasive reasoning to defend it. “God’s ways are
inscrutable,” says Maria’s priest. Father Weber,
when - evidently thinking of her developmentally
challenged brother Johannes - she asks why a child
would be punished with illness.
Taking Father Weber’s teachings on self-sacrifice
for others absolutely literally, Maria undertakes
to sacrifice herself for her brother: she stops
eating in exchange for his beginning to speak.
This course of action is, on one level, a sincere
and pious act of sacrifice. It is also a dare to God to
drop the inscrutability and provide a clear sign; an
experiment in shifting her religious knowledge
from the theoretical to the visceral. It is a desperate
act of love for her mother, who cannot be content
as long as Johannes’s condition endures. And it
is a reaction to the same earthly pressures that
drive countless people into eating disorders and
other forms of self-mutilation: the pressure of
others’ judgements, the awareness of one’s own
shortcomings, the fear of failure. Maria begins
her regime of self-starvation after Father Weber
observes her reaching for a cookie after class and
says, “I see a potential sacrifice there.”
Dietrich Briiggemann’s film, co-written with his
sister Anna Bruggemann, is keen in its observation
of the way that teenagers, and perhaps teenage girls
in particular, bear the weight of the perceptions
and projections of others. It’s apparent that
Maria’s mother’s barely restrained rage against her
daughter has more to do with her own regrets and
frustrations than with anything Maria does; and
that Father Weber’s excessive interest in Maria and
her nascent sexual desires may reveal something
about the origins of his own investment in self-
punishment. Like Jesus, Maria symbolically carries
things for others, simply by existing.
However, if- as one might glean from its tone
and presentation - the film intends to protest
against this undue burdening of an innocent, it
arguably creates something of a logic problem
for itself by having Maria’s sacrifice work Maria
dies, Johannes speaks - so the sect is right, and
self-sacrifice is effective. But she dies by choking
on a communion wafer, so the sect is wrong and
self-sacrifice is a preposterous, dangerous notion!
Or, either point of view is laughable, a massive
coincidence has just occurred, and we’re supposed
to snicker at the demise of a child...
At this point, a film thus far distinguished by
some subtle moments and sweet characterisations.
Peace offering: Stations of the Cross
and troubled mostly by a heavily sketched
maternal monster, becomes a pile-up of ironies
that threatens to collapse into meaninglessness.
With a little more cutesy dry humour. Stations of
the Cross might resemble - with its heart-touching
adolescent non-romance - something by Wes
Anderson. With a bit more sardonic rage, it would
seem to be imitating Lars von Trier. As it is, it feels
at once too mild and too cynical: keen to flag up
spiritual possibilities in the manner of, say, Ordet
(1955), but too mean and hip to fall for them itself.
Formally, it strives for and largely achieves
an extreme elegance and simplicity: it is strictly
divided into 14 short chapters named for the
Stations of the Cross, the scenes within them
largely still shots. Its most penetrating moments
are of kindness between Maria and Christian,
or between Maria and the family’s au pair,
Bernadette; it is less effective in its portrayal of
Maria’s hysterically angry mother, and misses a
whole seam of insights by reducing her father to
an absence so utter that it requires a double take
for the viewer to remember who he is each time he
appears on screen. This most passive of fathers gets
an unearned moment of moral outrage in a closing
scene between the parents which compounds the
narrow-minded implication that what has passed
has been the mother’s fault. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Producers
Sound Recordist
SWR, ARTE and Cine
Maria
Chiara Palmeri
Jochen Laube
Jacob ligner
Plus Filmproduktion
Franziska Weisz
Katharina
Leif Alexis
Costumes
GmbH supported by
mother
Linus Ruhr
Fabian Maubach
Bettina Marx
MFC Filmforderung
Florian Stetter
Johannes
Screenplay
Baden-Wurttemberg,
Father Weber
Birge Schade
Dietrich Bruggemann
©UFA Fiction, Cine
Medienboard
Lucie Aron
sports teacher
Anna Bruggemann
Plus, SWR, ARTE
Berlin-Brandenburg,
Bernadette
Ramin Yazdani
Cinematography
Production
Deutscher
Moritz Knapp
physician
Alexander Sass
Companies
Filmfdrderfonds
Christian
HannsZischler
Editor
Camino Filmverleih
Michael Kamp
mortician
Vincent Assmann
presents a UFA
Cast
father
Production Design
Fiction production in
Georg Wesch
In Colour
Klaus-Peter Flatten
co-production with
Lea van Acken
Thomas
[1.85:1]
Subtitles
Distributor
Arrow Film
Distributors Ltd
German
theatrical title
Kreuzweg
Set in present-day Germany, the film is divided
into chapters named after the 14 Stations of
the Cross used within Catholic devotions to
depict Jesus’s route to the crucifixion.
Fourteen-year-old Maria’s family belongs to a
strict Catholic sect; she is soon to be confirmed. Her
four-year-old brother Johannes cannot yet speak, and
is thought to be autistic. At a pre-confirmation class,
Maria is given instruction by her priest Father Weber on
the subject of self-sacrifice. Hoping to cure Johannes,
Maria begins to refuse food and warm clothing. A
schoolmate, Christian, befriends her and asks her
to join his church choir; Maria seeks her mother’s
permission, pretending that Christian is a girlfriend,
but her mother is infuriated at the prospect. Maria goes
to confession with Father Weber, and resolves to avoid
the choir and friendship with Christian. She refuses to
move to ‘Satanic’ pop music during gym class at school;
Christian is mocked by the other children for standing
up for her. Maria, ever weaker, asks Christian to leave
her alone. During her confirmation, Maria collapses.
After a standoff with her mother, the family doctor has
her taken into hospital, suspecting anorexia. In hospital,
Maria tells the family’s au pair Bernadette that she
has offered her life to God in exchange for Johannes’s
recovery. She asks for Father Weber to give communion.
Maria suffers respiratory arrest while trying to swallow
the communion wafer, and dies. At the moment of her
death, Johannes speaks for the first time, saying her
name. As Maria’s parents select a coffin, her mother
tells the funeral director that she hopes Maria will be
beatified. Christian drops a flower into Maria’s grave.
90 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Third Person
This is Where i Leave You
Belgium/USA/Germany/ltaly 2013 USA 2014
Director: Paul Haggis Director: Shawn Levy
Certificate 15 136m 31s Certificate 15 103m 9s
Reviewed Trevor Johnston
When his aggrieved publisher tells Liam Neeson’s
Pulitzer- winning novelist that his output has
been on a downward spiral since his early award-
garlanded triumph, it’s hard not to surmise that
writer-director Paul Haggis is taking the words
from his critics’ mouths - or perhaps even
being brutally honest with himself. Third Person
positively encourages such supposition, putting
centre-stage a creative artist who’s in a funk, and
whose struggles with his chosen form appear
to indicate an ongoing emotional ferment (or,
as the same tough-love editor opines, “random
characters making excuses for your life”).
If Neeson’s Paris-set story represents a
possible^/m a clef, what then are we to make
of Third Person’s other segments? Rome hosts
fashion-business hustler Adrien Brody’s
seemingly wilful desire to help stricken
Moran Atias rescue her unseen daughter from
money-grabbing smugglers, even though he’s
increasingly aware that he’s in the grip of a
‘Spanish Prisoner’ confidence trick; meanwhile
in New York an emotionally raw Mila Kunis is
barely holding it together while fighting her
sleek artist ex James Franco for visiting rights
to their son. Unlike Haggis’s 2004 Oscar
winner Crash, where the metaphor
of collision held together a survey of
America’s attitude to race (rather too
clunkily for many detractors),
here Haggis prefers to keep us
guessing about the thematic
connection between the film’s
three busily interwoven strands.
Editor Jo Francis does a sterling
job of keeping the whole thing
bustling forward, even though all
Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde
three sagas of romantic dysfunction appear
somewhat over-extended. But Haggis clearly
misjudges how much he should let slip about
the essentially literary basis of the resolution.
Indeed, by the time he delivers the final-reel ta-
daah, delineating fact from authorial invention
in what we’ve just seen, he’s given far too much
away and the audience is miles ahead of him. It’s
the sort of catastrophic misjudgement that can
often cloud one’s lasting opinion - but it would be
churlish not to recognise that Haggis’s facility for
spiky dialogue and his excellent cast prove most
diverting on a scene-by-scene basis. While the
overriding thrust of drumming up sympathy for
a middle-aged white male philanderer struck by
personal and creative setbacks is essentially a tad
resistible, Olivia Wilde certainly plays Neeson’s
acid-tongued, deeply troubled lover to the hilt,
and Kunis gives her tearful all to the shambolic,
ill-fated mother treated with glacial scorn by an
effectively smug Franco. Dario Marianelli’s slinky
score, rippling piano and baleful bandoneon,
providing impetus and mystery as and when
required, certainly adds to the film’s superficial
attractiveness, so it’s a shame that ultimate
directorial lack of control lets the side down.
Still, in throwing seemingly personal
neuroses at the screen and creating a
work that, however flawed, is
held together by (dare one say?)
Pirandellian conceit rather than
the usual prosaic narrative
button-pushing. Haggis can’t
be accused of playing it safe.
The days when he wrote
back-to-back Academy Award
winners may seem to be
slipping further into the past,
but he’s certainly not going
down without a fight. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
of the Apulia Film
Riccardo Scamarcio
Paul Breuls
Commission
Marco
Michael Nozik
Executive Producers
Oliver Crouch
Paul Haggis
Nils Dunker
Jesse
Written by
AnatoleTaubman
Paul Haggis
Arcadiy Golubovich
Dolby Digital
Director of
Timothy D. O’Hair
In Colour
Photography
GuyTannahill
[2.35:1]
Gian Filippo Corticelli
Fahar Faizaan
Edited by
Andrew David
Distributor
Jo Francis
Hopkins
Sony Pictures
Production Designer
Laurence Bennett
Releasing
Music
Cast
Dario Marianelli
Liam Neeson
Sound Mixer
Michael
Gilberto Martinelli
Mila Kunis
Costume Designer
Julia
Sonoo Mishra
Adrien Brody
Scott
©FilmfinanceXII
Olivia Wilde
Production
Anna
Companies
James Franco
Corsan presents a
Rick
Corsan, Highway
Moran Atias
61 production
Monika
in association
Vinicio Marchioni
withVolten,
Carlo
Lailaps Pictures,
Maria Bello
FilmfinanceXII
Theresa
A film by Paul Haggis
Kim Basinger
Made with the
Elaine
aid of the Belgian
David Harewood
Tax Shelter
Jake
Made with the
Loan Chabanol
generous support
Sam
Paris, Rome and New York, present day. Pulitzer-winning
American novelist Michael is in a hotel, struggling
with the draft of his latest book. Estranged from his
US-based spouse Elaine, he’s now involved with Anna,
a journalist with literary ambitions of her own. She is
staying in a room on the floor below so that they can
continue their affair - though she is also receiving
texts from another man. Meanwhile Scott is in Rome
to steal designs from a corrupt fashion insider. He
finds himself bewitched by the mysterious Monika,
draining his resources to pay the smugglers who
are supposedly bringing her daughter from abroad,
even though he’s increasingly convinced it’s a scam.
In New York, former soap actress Julia is battling
for custody of her son, who is staying with his artist
father Rick following a near-fatal accident while in
her care. Monika and Scott elope together. A tearful
Julia causes Rick to reflect on his culpability as an
absent dad. Julia’s lawyer is Scott’s wife Theresa -
their marriage was devastated by their daughter’s
accidental drowning due to Scott’s negligence.
Julia, Rick, Scott and Monika are revealed to be
fictional characters in Michael’s new manuscript,
which also exposes the real Anna’s incestuous
relationship with her father. Elaine is forgiving after
reading the manuscript; as Michael visualises the
elusive Anna, Julia and Monika in a Rome street,
he confesses that infidelity caused the inattention
leading to his own son’s drowning, and he is now
trying to exorcise his guilt in literary form.
Reviewed by Violet Lucca
Just as Georges Franju audaciously made a
bloodless horror film with Eyes Without a Face
(i960), so Shawn Levy has made a tearless
film about mourning - everyone in This Is
Where I Leave You is too wrapped up in his or
her own problems to get upset about their
recently deceased father. There’s another,
equally conspicuous absence: the Jewish family
sitting Shiva (the Jewish week-long period of
mourning) here is portrayed almost entirely
by non-Jewish actors. Such an elision is part of
the social fabric of the US - formerly ‘inferior’
immigrants from eastern and southern Europe
made their full transition to whiteness during
the post-war years, while Native Americans,
Latinos, Asians and blacks remained racially
‘other’. Yet it’s no less insensitive to mark a
culture or religion solely through the food in
their kitchen (there are several pointless slow
pans here across plates of half-eaten com-beef
sandwiches and pickles) and snarky comments
about the ritual they’re supposedly observing.
‘Observant’ is the operative word here, for the
members of the comically dysfunctional Altman
family are both totally detached from their
Jewishness and any self-awareness that would
allow them to see how they have ended up so
unhappy. Judd (Jason Bateman) has a lucrative
career in radio and a beautiful wife - until he
catches his shock-jock boss in bed with her. His
loudmouth sister Wendy (Tina Fey) is a mother
of two who’s married to a jerky workaholic and
pines for her ex-boyfriend Horry. (Their romance
was cut short when Horry suffered a severe brain
injury in a car accident, and Timothy Olyphant
plays what could’ve descended into parody
well, even though he’s repeatedly given lines
such as, “I have a severe brain injury”) Judd’s
tight-ass older brother Paul (Corey Stoll) can’t
get his wife pregnant, and Judd’s baby brother
Phillip (Adam Driver) is an idiot manchild
who’s dating his much older psychologist.
Despite their individual flaws and suffering,
all the siblings have some advice to give to Judd,
usually in ways that help to develop his otherwise
emotionally featureless character. Wendy offers:
“You don’t do complicated. You’ve had your
whole life mapped out.” This staggeringly generic
insight is apparently something Judd has never
considered, and he ends up repeating it several
times, only slightly rephrased. (Even at the best of
times, the true nature of family is not only saying
things that need to be said but also sometimes
saying too much, which the dialogue here fails to
convey.) Such instances of spontaneous sweetness
are either delivered unrealistically earnestly or
buried alongside lame attempts to be raunchy:
the matriarch, played by Jane Fonda, has had
breast augmentation in later life, so her gigantic,
liver-spotted breasts often pop out of her clothes;
at one point, Wendy goes into her mother’s
room for a chat and rests her head against them,
pausing to note how comfortable they are.
Judd slowly gets his groove back, despite
having no reliable source of income and
complications from his soon-to-be-ex. The twist,
underscoring how Judaism is merely a pretext
here, is that Judd’s (gentile) mother made
up her husband’s last wish for the family
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 91
REVIEWS
REVIEWS
O to sit Shiva together. It turns out that Judd’s
parents had already introduced Horry’s
mother into their marriage, and the two women
plan to continue the arrangement - the time
spent together as a family has simply been an
opportunity for the siblings to process this news.
Though surprised, everyone immediately accepts
the new arrangement, and soon some alt-pop junk
in the style of The Lumineers starts playing, hey-
ing and ho-ing away to show how much they -
and we - have grown. More than its insensitivity.
Levy’s film is remarkable for immediately,
irreparably dating itself with this choice. ©
Up in the air: Tina Fey, Jason Bateman
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Warner Bros.
Adam Driver
Paula Weinstein
Pictures presents
Phillip Altman
Shawn Levy
in association
Rose Byrne
Jeffrey Levine
with RatPac-Dune
Penny Moore
Screenplay
Entertainment a
Corey Stoii
Jonathan Tropper
Spring Creek, 21
Paul Altman
Based on his novel
Laps production
Kathryn Hahn
Director of
A Shawn Levy film
Annie Altman
Photography
With the support
Connie Britton
Terry Stacey
of the New York
Tracy Sullivan
Edited by
State Governor’s
Timothy Oiyphant
Dean Zimmerman
Office for Motion
Horry Callen
Production
Picture & Television
Dax Shepard
Designer
Development
Wade Beaufort
Ford Wheeler
Executive
Debra Monk
Music
Producers
Linda Callen
Michael Giacchino
Mary McLaglen
Abigail Spencer
Sound Mixer
Jonathan Tropper
Quinn Altman
Danny Michael
James Packer
Costumes
Steven Mnuchin
Dolby Digital/
Designed by
Datasat
Susan Lyall
Colour by
Cast
Technicolor
©Warner Bros.
Jason Bateman
[2.35:1]
Entertainment Inc.
Judd Altman
and RatPac-Dune
Tina Fey
Distributor
Entertainment LLC
Wendy Altman
Warner Bros
Production
Jane Fonda
Distributors (UK)
Companies
Hilary Altman
US, the present. Judd Altman comes home to find
his wife Quinn in bed with his boss. His sister Wendy
calls to tell him that their father has died. After the
funeral, their mother Hilary tells Judd and his siblings
that their father’s dying wish was that they sit Shiva
(the Jewish week-long period of mourning) together.
Judd runs into Penny, his high-school sweetheart, at
his father’s sports store. Judd’s brothers Phillip and
Paul argue about who will inherit the store. Wendy
forces Judd to admit to the rest of the family that he’s
getting a divorce. Phillip has a fight with his girlfriend,
and drops Judd off at the ice rink where Penny works.
They flirt. Quinn tells Judd that she’s pregnant with
his child. Judd sleeps with Penny. Wendy sleeps
with her ex, Horry. Quinn almost miscarries, and
Judd’s boss ends their affair. Hilary reveals that
she’s in a relationship with Horry’s mother, and
that sitting Shiva was just a pretext to get everyone
together to accept this fact. Judd promises to call
Penny after he’s had some time to himself, and
drives to Maine instead of his home in Manhattan.
What We Do in the Shadows
New Zealand/USA 2014
Directors: Jemaine Clement, Taika Waititi
Certificate 15 85m 23s
Reviewed by Roger Clarke
Four vampires live together in a flat. They
behave like first-year students - like characters
from The Young Ones, except that they’re all
rather old. It’s The Old Ones’, then. Petyr is the
Nosferatu in the basement - he’s been dead so
long there’s not much vestige of humanity left in
him. Viago, sweet-natured and always smiling,
has invited a human film crew into the house
to make a documentary. Deacon believes that
being a vampire makes him sexy. Vladislav
is a Vlad Dracul type who sees dungeons and
torture as the way to go but is haunted by an
encounter with an emasculating woman. They
float around the flat with vacuum cleaners.
Visual gags - very good ones - abound. The
vampires squabble about who does the washing-
up. They hate werewolves and hiss at them
like cats. The werewolves, who tend to prowl
around in packs, have anger-management
issues: “Remember we’re werewolves, not
swearwolves!” their leader exhorts.
The flatmates start to let hipster humans into
their everyday life. They accidentally turn one
into a vampire, and he then introduces them to
the pleasures of nightclubs and the internet. In
this sense the nearest kin to What We Do in the
Shadows is the HBO show True Blood, in which
vampires try to integrate into normal society.
There’s an occasional but not very enthusiastic
stab at poignancy, for example when Viago
stands outside the house of the woman who is
his great love but who is now an old lady, having
continued to age as he stays forever young.
An extended comedy sketch aiming for
student cult status (and likely to get it). Shadows
incorporates three powerful paradigms quite
neatly -it’s a flatshare comedy, a fish-out-of-water
comedy and a generational comedy. Imagine if the
makers of Flight of the Conchords had watched too
many films and TV shows involving Klaus Kinski,
Robert Pattinson, Tom Cruise, Roman Polanski,
Anna Paquin and Kare Hedebrant - and then
asked the designer of The Hobbit to build them
a vampire house in Wellington, New Zealand.
In fact, this is exactly what has happened.
Jemaine Clement, the bespectacled one from
Conchords, co-stars and co-directs with Taika
Waititi, who also wrote and directed an episode
The elegant in the room: Waititi, Brugh
of Conchords. The other actors are mostly well-
known comedians or comic actors in their
native New Zealand. Despite its Kiwi flavour,
however, there’s a noticeable affinity with
Christopher Guest’s comedies of the grotesque
- though perhaps Shadows has a bit more
heart. It’s more Withnailthm Best in Show.
Set and production design is by Ra Vincent,
who was Oscar-nominated for his work on
The Hobbit; the music - folk-, punk- and gypsy-
inflected - is from Plan 9, who are Peter Jackson’s
go-to soundtrack people. The script is largely
improvised, expanding on a short film made
by Waititi in 2005, and it seems that the shoot
was baggy and relaxed, since according to the
press notes there were 125 hours of footage to
edit. Despite this capaciousness in production.
Shadows is genre-loaded as tightly as a tourniquet
- though it works, this reviewer would guess,
whether you know the references or not. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Produced by
Taika Waititi
Chelsea Winstanley
Emanuel Michael
Written by
Jemaine Clement
Taika Waititi
Cinematography
DJ Stipsen
Richard Bluck
Editing
JonnoWoodford-
Robinson
Yana Gorskaya
Tom Eagles
Production Designer
Ra Vincent
Originai Music
Plans
Sound Recordist
Chris Hiles
Costume Designer
Amanda Neale
©Shadow
Pictures Ltd
Production
Companies
Unison Films
presents a Defender
Films production in
association with Park
Road Post Production
and the New Zealand
Documentary Board
Produced in
association with
The New Zealand
Film Commission
Cast
Jemaine Clement
Vladislav
Taika Waititi
Viago
Jonathan Brugh
Deacon
Cori Gonzaiez-
Macuer
Nick
Stu Rutherford
Stu
Ben Fransham
Petyr
Jackie Van Beek
Jackie
Eiena Stejko
Pauline, The Beast’
Jason Hoyie
Julian
in Coiour and
Biack and White
[1.78:1]
Distributor
Metrodrome
Distribution Ltd
Wellington, New Zealand, present day. Viago, a vampire,
has invited a human film crew into his home to make
a lifestyle documentary. Viago’s flatmates are fellow
vampires Deacon, Vladislav and 8,000-year-old Petyr.
In a new spirit of openness, the vampires allow young
hipster Nick into their home. Nick brings along Stu,
whom the vampires like even more. Unfortunately,
Nick is bitten by Petyr. Now a vampire, Nick introduces
the others to the world of the internet and nightclubs.
On one outing, the vampires bump into a vampire-
hunter, who subsequently breaks into their flat
and kills Petyr. Stu is abducted by werewolves. The
flatmates let Stu back into the fold even though it
seems he might now be a werewolf. Viago bites the
woman who is still the love of his life, though she
is now grown old. They all live happily together.
92 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Winter Sleep
Turkey/France/Germany 2014
Director: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Reviewed Jonathan Romney
The end credits of Nuri Bilge
l Ceylan’s Palme d’Or-winning
' feature mention Chekhov,
Shakespeare, Dostoevsky and
Voltaire, all of them, it appears,
directly quoted in the film. But the line that
Winter Sleep most obviously brings to mind is
from Sartre: “Hell is other people.” The characters
in this singularly claustrophobic huis clos drama
painfully tear each other apart, not least when
they think they are acting with good intentions.
The eager-to-please country hodja (Islamic teacher)
Hamdi tries to calm the tension between his
embittered brother Ismail and their landlord
Aydin by taking his nephew to apologise to
Aydin for vandalising his jeep; the result is worse
discord. And when Aydin’s young wife Nihal tries
to help Hamdi’s family by handing over a wad of
banknotes, Ismail responds with devastatingly
quiet contempt before flinging the money on the
fire - in its depiction of unassuageable despair
and pride, the most Dostoevskian moment here.
Winter Sleep is without doubt a formidably
achieved, intellectually substantial drama that
deals variously with questions of conscience,
responsibility and self-deception. These
topics catch the imagination when they are
worked through in the narrative, but they grip
considerably less when picked over explicitly
in long, stagey discussions. Winter Sleep is a
film inspired by theatre - Ceylan has long
proclaimed his love of Chekhov - and filled
with theatrical allusions, including the masks
and posters in Aydin’s study (he is a retired
actor). Understandable, then, that it should
feel theatrical; but if Winter Sleep is Ceylan’s
most ambitious screenplay (he co-wrote it
with his wife and regular collaborator Ebru
Ceylan), it is far from his most successful film.
On a first viewing in Cannes this year, my
feeling was that Winter Sleep wdiS a film to be
reckoned with, and possibly a great one, but
not quite one to be much enjoyed. Watching it
again, I still find it hard to savour, despite many
masterful qualities - and perhaps it’s because of
those qualities, which never quite cohere into a
dynamic whole, that Winter Sleep is all the more
disappointing. An imposing portrait of a vain,
deluded, yet intensely charming man in decline - a
minor-league Lear of the steppes - the drama is
involved and wide-ranging, with several subplots
running in tandem despite the ostensible lack of
action. But for much of the time, the characters
do little except talk at length, in darkened rooms.
These people are nothing if not articulate, and are
acted with subtle, sometimes mischievous brio;
but some of the longer dialogues (the showdown
between Aydin and Nihal lasts roughly 30
minutes) feel like transcribed chapters of a novel.
And the emotional and intellectual shifts traced
by the exchanges are not always easy to follow: it
would, for example, take more than one viewing
to properly gauge the dynamics of the triangle
between Nihal, Aydin and the latter’s recently
divorced sister Necla, who lives with them, and the
(largely hidden) background to their grievances.
From a filmmaker who is also held to be
a landscape photographer of considerable
brilliance. Winter Sleep is highly perverse: set in a
The inn crowd: Haluk Bilginer
breathtaking setting, the mountainous expanses
of Cappadocia, the film gives us several striking
outdoor moments, yet chooses to keep us mostly
indoors, in the cave-like rooms of the hotel
where Aydin has essentially dug in to shelter
(hibernation is one meaning of the title; another
is the implication that he is sleepwalking through
the final act of his life). There is a dramatic logic
to the play of interior and exterior, emphasised by
Gokhan Tiryaki’s widescreen photography; we
feel the enclosure all the more because of what
we’ve glimpsed outdoors, and when we head out
again, it feels like a welcome escape. Yet the film
is claustrophobically static for long stretches, and
the moments when Winter Sleep finds its dramatic
life only underline the heaviness of the rest.
But when Winter Sleep comes alive, it is as
powerful and suggestive as any Ceylan film.
The script plays the long game, setting up early
crises that play out much later: a chat with a
visiting motorcyclist leads to Aydin’s having a
wild horse captured, then much later releasing
it, in a mesmerising night shot; and Aydin’s
early visit to Hamdi is echoed at the end in
Nihal’s humiliating encounter with Ismail.
This latter scene puts the stamp on Winter Sleep
as the work of a magnificent director of actors.
However finely sketched the character of Hamdi
is in the script, as a man trying to please everyone
and maintaining a tenuous grip on his own
dignity in the process, his dilemma most deeply
finds its meaning in actor Serhat Kilic’s painfully
ambivalent grin. The three lead performances are
superb, with Demet Akbag having a showstopping
moment as Necla, coolly demolishing her brother
from the comfort of his own sofa. But it’s in their
silence that these performances are often the
most eloquent; the film offers a prize instance
of the Kuleshov effect, as Melisa Sozen’s Nihal
confronts Haluk Bilginer’s Aydin, and Ceylan
keeps cutting back to Bilginer, barely changing as
he half-smiles through his grizzled beard, although
his look seems to mean something different
in every shot. It is such quietly but resonantly
cinematic moments that offer a glimpse of the
great film in Winter Sleep, as opposed to the
ambitious, intellectually rigorous but rather
laborious screen novel that it ultimately is. ©
Credits and Synopsis
Producer
Zeynep Ozbatur
Atakan
Screenplay
Ebru Ceylan
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Inspired by the stories
of Anton Chekhov
Director of
Photography
Gokhan Tiryaki
Editors
Nuri Bilge Ceylan
BoraGbksingbl
Art Director
Gamze Kus
Sound Recordist
Andreas Mticke
Niesytka
©Zeyno Film,
Memento Films
Production, Bredok
Film Production,
Arte France Cinema,
NBC Film
Production
Companies
AZeyno Film,
Memento Films
Production, Bredok
Film Production
production
In collaboration with
Arte France Cinema,
Mars Entertainment
Group,lmaj
With the participation
ofTCKulturTurizm
Bakanligi Sinema
GenelMudurltigu,
Arte France,
Medienboard Berlin-
Bradenburg,Aideaux
Cinemas du Monde,
Centre National du
Cinema etde I’lmage
Animee,Ministeredes
Affaires Etrangeres,
Institut Frangais,
Post Republic, Sony
Executive Producer
Sezgi Ustun
Cast
Haluk Bilginer
Aydin
Melisa Sozen
Nihal
Demet Akbag
Necla
Ayberk Pekcan
Hidayet, driver
Serhat Kilic
Hamdi, Imam
Tamer Levent
Suavi
Nadir Saribacak
Levent, teacher
Mehmet Ali Nuroglu
Timur, hotel guest
Nejat Isler
Ismail
Dolby Digital
In Colour
[ 2 . 35 : 1 ]
Subtitles
Distributor
NewWave Films
Turkish theatrical title
Kis uykusu
Cappadocia, Anatolia, winter. Aydin, an elderly retired
actor, runs a hotel on his late father’s estate; he lives
there with his young wife Nihal and his divorced sister
Necla. The window of Aydin’s jeep is smashed by the
young son of unemployed tenant Ismail, who has fallen
foul of his rent collectors; Ismail’s brother Hamdi
brings the boy to the hotel to apologise, but he faints.
Necla launches an attack on her brother, who writes an
opinionated column for a local newspaper. Nihal holds a
meeting to raise money for a nearby school but excludes
Aydin; later, they have a bitter argument. Aydin leaves
for Istanbul but instead spends a drunken evening at
the home of a farmer friend. Nihal gives Hamdi the
money she has raised for the school, for his struggling
family, but Ismail angrily burns the banknotes. Aydin
returns home and starts writing his long-planned book.
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 93
REVIEWS
HOME CINEMA
Home cinema
Hard-hitting: the high-definition restoration of Goto, Isle of Love was crowdfunded, meaning fans really did put their money where their mouths are
REASONS TO BELIEVE
A new box-set makes a persuasive
case for placing Polish director
Walerian Borowczyk in the
pantheon of filmmaking greats
CAMERA OBSCURA: THE
WALERIAN BOROWCZYK
COLLECTION
THE BEAST/IMMORAL TALES/BLANCHE/
GOTO, ISLE OF LOVE/THE THEATRE OF
MR AND MRS KABAL/SHORT HLMS
Walerian Borowczyk; France 1959-84; Arrow Academy Region
B/2 Blu-ray/DVD; certificate 18; 1.37:1, 1.66:1, 1.85:1; Features:
344 page book edited by Daniel Bird and Michael Brooke;
English translation of Borowczyk's 1992 collection of short
stories, Anatomy of the Devil: documentaries featuring cast
and crew, hour-long portrait of Borowczyk; introduction to
the short films by Terry Gilliam; Borowczyk's commercials;
Blow Ups visual essay by Daniel Bird; Film is not a Sausage:
Borowczyk's Short Films: new interview programme featuring
Borowczyk, producer Dominique Duverge-Segretin, assistant
Andre Fleinrich and composer Bernard Parmegian
Reviewed by Kim Newman
This box-set is much more than a Blu-ray/DVD
assemblage of Walerian Borowczyk’s best-known
films; it’s a persuasive, deliberate bid to elevate
an often overlooked, marginalised or ignored
filmmaker to the pantheon. The simple fact that
Borowczyk has received this sort of treatment
means that his partisans’ enthusiasm - the high-
definition restoration of Goto, Isle of Love (Goto, Me
d’amour) was crowdfunded, meaning that fans
really did put their money where their mouths
are - must command respect The set sold out
almost before release (though individual discs are
still available), which limits its ability to preach
to the unconverted, but true believers who stuck
by Boro during his hard times, which famously
extended to a troubled experience directing
Emmanuelle 5 (1987), will be treasuring the result
The set does not claim to be complete - it
assembles the Polish-bom director’s French
output from 1959 to 1984 and thus lacks his
Polish-made shorts (including the crucial Dom,
1958, co-directed with Jan Lenica) and feature
The Story of Sin (Dzieje grzechu, 1975). There
is an attempt to address if not counter the
commonplace that Borowczyk began as a serious
artist and declined into softcore pornography,
noting the interest in the erotic (especially the
fetishisation of everyday or antique objects)
present in the early live-action and animated
shorts (and even his most chaste feature, Blanche).
Wewing the films in order, it’s impossible to miss
the continuity of vision from the surreal, spiky,
disturbing animated feature The Theatre of Mr and
Mrs Kabal ( Theatre de Monsieur et Madame Kabal,
1967) through the dissociated, dreamlike Goto
and the austere medieval drama Blanche (igy 2) to
the uninhibited yet curiously cadenced Immoral
Tales (Contes immorawc, 1974) and the scandalous,
blackly comic The Beast (La Bete, 1975).
The first three had a limited art-film
exposure - though it’s plain that Blanche is
an attempt at something more mainstream
than Mr and Mrs Kabal or Goto - and resonated
with audiences and critics who had noticed
the short films. However, the last two films in
this set were commercially successful in the
era when Just Jaeckin’s Emmanuelle (igy 4) was
establishing an international market for chic
French sex films - Borowczyk even hired Sylvia
Kristelfor The Streetwalker (La Marge, 1976)-
though TheBeastwdiS subject to troubles with
British censorship, fully documented here.
In this context, it is clear that the ‘sex films’
emerge from Borowczyk’s own interests and
obsessions rather than being tailored to fit a
genre that didn’t really exist when he set out
94 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
on his immoral tales project The Beasth^gdin
as The Beast of Gevaudan, an episode of his first
anthology film; the alternate cut of Immoral
Tales, which includes the 22-minute sequence
that would become the interpolated dream
of the heroine of The Beast, is included here.
Arrow’s set features a wealth of supplements.
Worthies from Terry Gilliam to Peter Bradshaw
are pulled in to deliver individual on-camera
introductions to the feature films; every title
is complemented (and complimented) by a
retrospective ‘making of documentary; separate
features concentrate on the short films and on
Borowczyk’s work as a sculptor; there’s a lengthy
1985 Borowczyk interview and also a useful
general introductory documentary. Certain
collaborators - cinematographer Noel Very and
assistant Dominique Duverge - crop up often,
delivering especial insight; nearly an hour of
silent on-set footage of Borowczyk directing The
Beast is included, which Very helpfully comments
on, skipping slightly over the replacement of
the leading lady only a day or so into production
but wryly pointing out how typical of the
director was the care he we see him taking when
personally applying a prosthetic tail to the
uncomfortable actor (Pierre Benedetti) revealed
as a beast in the climax. Elsewhere, there is some
comment that certain performers were frustrated
working with a director who could be found up a
ladder painting tiny details on the set but seldom
talked with them. Borowczyk claims that he hired
the likes of Pierre Brasseur (Goto), Michel Simon
(Blanche) and Marcel Dalio (The Beast) for their
screen personas, and didn’t feel a need to tell them
precisely what to do, though Very also suggests
that at that point in his career Borowczyk’s
French was broken and heavily accented (which
it doesn’t seem to be in the 1985 interview) and he
found it easier to get what he wanted by miming
scenes and asking actors to imitate him (not an
approach guaranteed to work on veteran stars -
especially when he wanted presence rather than
performance). The great Borowczyk performer
may be his wife Ligia Branice, star of Goto and
Blanche, who mostly uses her eyes - her ‘look’
is the original of most of the immoral women
in subsequent Borowczyk movies; it’s a shame
that she doesn’t appear in any of the extras.
The Kabal disc includes a programme of
Borowczyk’s shorts, which - as Raymond
Durgnat and Philip Stride argue in insightful
essays - would be enough to establish him as
an important filmmaker even if he had never
made a feature: The Astronauts (ig'^g). The Concert
(i 96 2, an introduction to Mr and Mrs Kabal),
Grandma’s Encyclopedia (1963), Renaissance
(1964), Angels’ Games (1964), Joachim’s Dictionary
(1965), Rosalie (ig 66 ). Gavotte (ig 6 y). Diptych
(1967), The Phonograph (ig 6 g). The Greatest
Love of All Time (1977) and Scherzo Infernal
(1984). A Private Collection (1973) and Venus on
the Half Shell(igyf), playful documentaries
about erotic artefacts, are extracted from the
shorts programme and partnered with the
features they were intended to accompany and
elucidate. Immoral Tales and The Beast A slightly
longer pre-release cut of A Private Collection is
Immoral Tales
included, though UK law means that some
still-offending frames have to be blanked out.
Renaissance and The Phonograph are fully the
equal of the animated shorts Jan Svankmajer was
making at the time - and the use of inanimate
objects prefigures the peculiar obsessiveness that
recurs throughout Borowczyk’s work. For him,
eroticism is often in distractions: in the most
blatant sex-fantasy sequence in Immoral Tales,
for example, as the action any real pornographer
would zoom in on gets started, Borowczyk’s
camera not only fixes on the symbolic crashing
waves that have substituted for sex since
silent cinema, but also on the patterns made
by wheeling seabirds over the beach where a
young man has persuaded his willing cousin to
act out his own fantasy while obtusely failing
to understand hers. The most provocative
moments in The Beast depend on a rhythmic
subjective camera movement rather than the
gushing prosthesis and bug-eyed nymphomaniac
performance that attracted all the censorious ire.
A work of heroic endeavour on the part
of restorers/documentarians Daniel Bird, James
White and Michael Brooke, this maybe only the
first step in a general reassessment of Borowczyk.
Of the later films, the Stevenson adaptation
On the strength of the
work shown here, even
‘Emmanuelle f might
merit a second look
Dr Jekyll et les femmes (i 98 1) is perhaps (along
with Blanchejhis single most satisfying feature;
it develops the worldview of the earlier works,
combining the unbridled passions of the immoral
tales with the domestic horrors of the Kabals or
the more extreme shorts. (Borowczyk’s preferred
title was The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Miss
Osbourne, but it could equally be The Theatre of
Dr Jekyll and Miss Osbourne- as Mr Hyde and
Jekyll’s transformed fiancee rampage through a
household of smug Victorians.) There may also
be good reason to revisit The Streetwalker, one
of Borowczyk’s few contemporary-set works,
and his version of Wedekind’s Lulu (1980), with
Udo Kier, his Dr Jekyll, as Jack the Ripper - not
to mention his nunsploitation essay Behind
Convent Walls (Intemo di un convento, 1978)
and Immoral Tales follow-up Immoral Women
(Les Heroines du mol, 1979). On the strength
of the work shown here, even Emmanuelle g
might merit a second look, though its release
version was not what the director intended.
Even the sleeves of this set are packed with
content: Arrow’s elegant photographic covers
can be reversed to showcase Borowczyk’s own,
scratchier designs (he began as a poster artist).
The ‘booklet’ that fills out the sturdy slipcase
almost earns a review of its own: it comprises
a substantial collection of critical writings,
including pertinent pieces by Durgnat, Stride,
Patrice Feconte, David Thompson, Peter Graham,
Chris Newby and Robert Benayoun; some of
these are drawn from Sight & Sound, showing how
long this publication has been a booster of Boro
(though Tom Milne, another fervent admirer,
is sadly left out but for a single, unattributed
review quote). Editors Bird and Brooke take care
to feature additional notes about the restorations
and the valiant effort involved in showing these
films in their best light: seeing them again in
superb-quality transfers after decades of battered
prints or bootlegs enhances appreciation of
Borowczyk’s remarkable, rigorous frame-making
and astonishing eye for tapestry-like detail. The
double-covered book flips over to become the
first English-language edition of Borowczyk’s
short-story collection Anatomy of the Devil (iggi).
The ‘stories’ tend to be fragments, anecdotes,
experiments and oddities with accompanying
artwork - oblique on their own, but intriguing
footnotes to a multimedia body of work. ©
Blanche
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 95
HOME CINEMA
HOME CINEMA
New releases
FILMS BY FRANK BORZAGE
I’VE ALWAYS LOVED YOU
USA 1946; Olive Films/Region 1 NTSC DVD; 117 minutes; 1.37:1
MAGNIFICENT DOLL
USA 1946; Olive Films/Region 1 NTSC DVD; 96 minutes; 1.37:1
THAT’S MY MAN
USA 1947; Olive Films/Region 1 NTSC DVD; 99 minutes; 1.37:1
Reviewed by Michael Atkinson
The auteurist salvation of Frank Borzage has
been one of the most rewarding film-culture
shifts of the past quarter of a century; not long
ago, even his late silents and 30s melodramas
were all but forgotten, and today seem on the
verge of becoming canonical. From Lazybones
(1925) to Moonrise (ig4S) at least, an expansive
stretch that leaves out several silents and
includes perhaps another dozen forgettable
studio projects, Borzage unleashed a distinctive
sensibility on the clockwork of glam Hollywood
storytelling: naturalistic sensitivity in the
service of a mythopoetic romanticism that
often careered into pure magical thinking.
Borzage was the quintessential romantic in
a throng of Golden Age romantics, a true but
never naive believer in the unpredictable gravity
of the heart, treating with reverence absurd
lovesick plot twists that other directors would
employ as kitsch, and attaining in almost every
film a tincture of thoughtful heartbreak.
Of course, the man’s career scans like a decades-
long struggle to accommodate his studio bosses
and still locate the Borzagiana in life, and so these
three late films - made as his career dissipated,
with only three more credited features to go
over the next 1 2 years - are forgotten secondary
works, often dismissed for the very tonal flights
and dreamy pulse-beats that make them so
identifiably his. Gone are the silvery fantasy
launches of the interbellum and the larger
budgets of the early 40s; here, Borzage finds
himself in a newly hardened post-war America,
and he explores subcultures almost as a means of
finding some way back into innocence. The finest
of the three. I’ve Always Loved You, may be the best
and most serious film ever made about classical
piano, centred on the impossible romantic bond
between Philip Dorn’s faithless, egomaniacal
European maestro and his protegee, corn-fed
Pennsylvania schoolgirl Catherine McLeod.
A frozen-faced discovery of Borzage’s who was
quite apparently trained as a pianist, McLeod
makes for an oddly awkward heroine, but the
film around her is so music-drenched and so
devoted to the details and romantic aura of its
world that the cast and characters don’t matter
as much as the swoonsome ideas they embody.
A few major set pieces make the point: one
famous sequence has the estranged quasi-lovers,
each alone and hundreds of miles apart, both
day dreamily playing Beethoven’s Appassionata’
at the same time, in synch, Borzage cutting back
and forth between them in a wordless suite of
cosmic connectivity. But that’s eclipsed by the
majestic 15-minute tour deforce of tliQ heroine’s
Carnegie Hall debut, playing Rachmaninov’s
Piano Concerto No 2 with her master conducting,
just as their relationship is crippled by betrayal
and jealousy. The performance is immediately
seen as a contest of wills - stagehands, rooting for
McLeod’s ingenue, commend her by signing their
Kings of comedy: The Clowns
own names to a delivered bouquet of flowers -
and bitternesses and fears arise during the playing,
palpable to everyone but never articulated, as the
music pours on and the pianist begins to cry as
she pounds through the achingly sad concerto.
It’s the most emotionally torturous exploration
of concert culture in the Hollywood annals.
Magnificent Doll, an unsliced bologna log
written by nascent bestselling trash novelist
Irving Stone and imagining a love triangle
between post-Revolutionary icons Dolly Madison
(Ginger Rogers), Aaron Burr (David Niven) and
James Madison (a sweet Burgess Meredith), is
far less notable, though its notion of Burr as a
genteel megalomaniac remains disarming.
That’s My Man, out of circulation of any
kind for decades, returns to Borzage’s fable-like
tone in the rather simple romantic rise and fall
of a mismatched couple - Don Ameche, as a
rebellious ex-accountant with irresponsible
dreams of owning a champion racehorse,
and McLeod as his indulgent better half.
Circumstantially, the story ends up being about
a marriage that is assailed by his unquenchable
thirst for gambling, but rather mysteriously
Borzage gives the melancholy scenario the quality
of a wistful fairytale, with Roscoe Karns spinning
the yam from his cabbie’s seat, imbuing Ameche’s
stargazer with the stature of a tragically flawed
hero of myth. Moments of sheer childlike wonder
keep sneaking in: the young couple bedding
down on opposite couches, muttering “It’s a
wonderful world” into the darkness; Ameche’s
lost boy nuzzling his soulmate horse, quietly
asking, “Did I ever tell you I love you?” and so
on. Not a great movie all in all, but it’s enough
to make you wonder if Borzage wasn’t Golden
Age Hollywood’s equivalent of Blake or Shelley,
reaching for the fabulistic and transcendent.
Disc: Standard archive prints, very clean.
DAS CABINET DES DR CALIGARI
Robert Wiene; Germany 1920; Eureka/Masters of Cinema/
Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD Dual Format; Certificate
U; 77 minutes; 1.33:1; Features: commentary by David
Kalat, documentary ‘Caligari: The Birth of Horror in the
First World War', video essay by David Cairns ‘You Must
Become Caligari’, restoration notes, trailer, booklet
Reviewed by Philip Kemp
Accounts differ but it seems likely that the
role-reversal framing story of Caligari, where
the narrator turns out to be a lunatic and the
monstrous doctor is revealed as the caring asylum
head, was suggested by Fritz Lang. (It’s also been
suggested that Lang was originally slated to
direct, until producer Erich Pommer diverted
him on to part two of Die Spinnen.) Not everyone,
then or since, has approved of the change. Hans
Janowitz and Carl Mayer, writers of the original
story, vainly protested, and Siegfried Kracauer
later argued that “while the original story exposed
the madness inherent in authority, [Robert]
Wiene’s Caligari glorified authority and convicted
its antagonist of madness”, thus mirroring the
inclination of “most Germans” in the fraught
post-war period to “retreat into a shell”.
Whether for this reason or not, Caligari
scored a major hit in its domestic market. It
also became the first German film to make it
big internationally, kickstarting the Golden
Age of German silent cinema and, with its
mix of visual stylisation and macabre subject
matter, prefiguring much that followed: Lang’s
Destiny (1921) and Dr Mabuse (igii), Murnau’s
Nosferatu (1922), Paul Leni’s Waxworks (1^24)
and Pabst’s Secrets of a Sow/ (19 2 6). It wasn’t
without its predecessors, such as Paul Wegener’s
The Golem (1919) and Robert Reinert’s Nerves
(1919), but Caligari s unprecedented impact
outstripped them all. It also overshadowed its
director’s career; Wiene’s other 40-odd films,
before and after, have faded into obscurity.
Much of the film’s haunting power derives
from the expressionist set designs of Hermann
Warm. The frame story apart, there’s not the
least attempt at realism: the scenery is blatantly
painted on canvas in broad strokes, with little
concern for perspective and barely an upright
to be seen, as if reflecting a mind askew. The
performances of Werner Krauss as Caligari and
Conrad Veidt as his somnambulist creature
Cesare seem as potently deranged as the sets,
and the final iris-in to the now supposedly
benevolent doctor’s face leaves a disquieting
glint of doubt: just who is the madman?
Disc: Another exemplary restoration from
the EW. Mumau Foundation, with a rich gallery
of extras.
THE CLOWNS
Federico Fellini; Italy 1970; Eureka/Masters of Cinema/
Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD Dual Eormat;
97 minutes; 1.37:1; Eeatures: ‘Eellini's Circus' (essay
film by Adriano Apra), booklet
Reviewed by Pasquale lannone
As Sam Rohdie points out in Fellini Lexicon
(2002), “Film is like a circus for Fellini and the
clown is its crucial element. Clowning is the
structural heart of the Fellinian image.”
Between his two large-scale features Satyricon
(1969) and Roma (1972), the director embarked
on a smaller, more intimate project for Italian
TV, which brought the figure of the clown
centre-stage. Less a straight documentary and
more a playful essay film. The Clowns oyons
with a boy (a proxy for the young Fellini) being
awoken in the dark of night by grunts coming
from outside his bedroom window. He opens
the shutters and looks down to see a circus tent
being hoisted upwards. We cut to the following
morning and the boy rushes downstairs
ready for school. He sees that outside
96 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Rediscovery
FANTASTIC MR ZEMAN
One of the masters of 20th-century
illusionism, Karel Zeman has
had a profound influence on
the fantasy cinema of today
A JESTER’S TALE
Karel Zeman; Czechoslovakia 1964; Second Run/Region 0
DVD; Certificate PC; 82 minutes; 1.85:1; Features: booklet
Reviewed by Nick Bradshaw
Four years ago, the Czech National Bank issued
a special silver 200-crown coin decorated on
one side with a collage of figures including
Sinbad the Sailor and the Apprentice’s
Sorcerer, on the other with an action montage
featuring a giant octopus wrestling with a
submarine as a dirigible flies into view
The occasion was the centenary of Karel
Zeman, one of the masters of fantasy cinema,
whose technically ambitious and visually
entrancing translations of his literary and
artistic forebears deserve renown on a par with
Ray Harryhausen, with whom he competed
on a series of Sinbad films (released as the
1974 compilation Adventures of Sinbad the
Sailor dikdi A Thousand and One Nights).
He is perhaps best known, though, for
his devotion to the escapades of Jules Verne,
which inspired four features between 1955
and 1970 - thereby conferring upon Zeman
the mantle of fellow advocate Georges Mdies,
whose crafty, anything-goes illusionism he
also extended. An Invention for Destruction aka
The Fabulous World of Jules Verne for
example, quotes the line engravings by the
likes of Leon Benett that illustrated Verne’s
original editions, adding hatching lines to its
live-action sets and costumes while compositing
them with an amazingly seamless medley of
animation techniques - from stop-motion
models, puppets and cut-outs to matte paintings
and double exposures - to forge a canvas as
panoramic as a James Bond adventure yet as
sensuously handmade as a Brothers Quay short.
Later confectioners from Tim Burton to Wes
Anderson have tipped their hats to Zeman,
but the clearest lineage in terms of tenor and
style is to Terry Gilliam, not least in the other
two films (besides the Verne quartet) made in
this mixed animation/live-action mode. Better
known is his Baron Munchausen (i 96 1), by
repute the best of the several screen versions,
with its visual inspiration from Gustave Dore;
but there’s a very Gilliam-esque rambunctious
irreverence in A Jester’s Tale, which marks its
own half-centenary by breaking the duck on
quality English-language DVD releases of Zeman’s
films (though a number are available from the
Czech Republic), and simultaneously marks the
Second Run label’s first foray into animation.
(The excavation of buried Eastern European
treasure is, of course, the label’s stock in trade.)
Set, very lightly, during the less-than-amusing
Thirty Years’ War, it’s a Candide-lik^ picaresque
Magic kingdom: Karel Zeman’s A Jester’s Tale
about a dreamy ploughboy, Petr, who’s press-
ganged into battle, dodges a round of bullets and,
having picked up a pair of fellow travellers (an
earthier platoon comrade and a gamine peasant
girl), ends up guest and sometime prisoner at the
castle of either the king or emperor, and indeed for
a while an unwitting fiance to the princess, one of
a succession of such with whom the court painter
can barely keep up. The quicksand, who-cares
geopolitics are wilful (and very Czech New Wave):
fortunes here are literally buffeted by the wind, a
fat-cheeked apparition that frequents proceedings
to turn flags back to front, the battlefront left
to right and back again. (Petr’s accomplice
He forges a canvas as
panoramic as a Bond adventure
yet as sensuously handmade
as a Brothers Quay short
Valentina Thielova as Countess Veronika
Sergeant Matej tries to stay one step ahead with
a reversible battle tunic but has less luck than
Lenka, the peasant girl they disguise as a jester.)
It’s all very Good Soldier Svejk going on Monty
Itython and the Holy Grail; you might also discern
in Petr’s handsome vacuity a touch of Barry
Lyndon and his travels, or even something of
Sancho Panza in Sergeant Matej, but the general
tenor is a very pantomimic, childlike satire.
(The screenplay is by writer-turned-director
Pavel Juracek, who also wrote IkarieXBi and
Daisies.) As with the ironised artificiality of Eric
Rohmer’s Perceval le Gallois, the actual depth is in
that cartoonishness. Zeman’s black-and-white
design work here pays tribute to the 17th-century
Topographia Germaniae’ engravings of Matthaus
Merian, with sweeping continental battlescapes
and magnificent castles, not least the palace that
hosts the film’s second half. The interiors of the
castle are also witty composites of theatrical and
matte paintings, and there’s a wondrous sequence
when Petr wanders the corridors in which the
walls seem to come alive and spill their secrets.
As far as the human actors go, Petr Kostka as the
journeyman Petr is jejune, even for a Czech New
Wave protagonist, though perhaps he’s meant
to merge into the backdrops - whereas I wanted
to see more of Emilia Vasaryova, the future
doyenne of Slovak theatre, who’s able to give her
character Lenka a degree of animation even inside
her jester’s garb. Zeman regular Miloslav Holub
gives Matej a raffish, happy-go-lucky quality that
defines the material - and shows off a leaping
high-speed leg-wiggle (care of the animator) that
military tacticians may want to pore over. ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 97
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New releases
O the tent is now fully upright He passes
his mother, who’s ironing in front of
the fire, and makes his way tentatively to the
open door. Even for Fellini, a director whose
filmography abounds with evocative opening
scenes, these first two minutes of screen time are
breathtaking, especially the last section, with the
boy framed in such a way as to recall the famous
opening of John Ford’s The Searchers (ig’^ 6 ).
The film takes us inside the tent and we
experience the circus show from the perspective
of the young Fellini. The director’s voiceover
goes on to explain how the figures he saw at
the circus as a child reminded him of real-life
characters in the Emilia-Romagna provinces
(these include a “clumsy, clowning tramp”,
a “dwarf nun”, squabbling coachmen and a
menacing WWI veteran). Fellini then moves
into film-essay/mockumentary territory: he
introduces his film crew and becomes more of an
onscreen presence himself. He’s briefly reunited
with La dolce vita’s Anita Ekberg, for instance,
and is shown interviewing various figures,
including clown historian Tristan Remy in Paris.
With an air of melancholy typical of the
director (and reflected in Nino Rota’s score). The
Clowns is proof, if any were needed, that Fellini
and the essay film were made for one another.
Disc: The transfer is exceptional, allowing
viewers to appreciate fully The Clown^
glorious colour palette. A 42-minute visual
essay by Italian critic Adriano Apra provides
fascinating insight into the film, including
details of its original TV transmission (in
black-and-white!) on Christmas Day 1970.
THE DEATH KISS
Edwin L. Marin; USA 1932; Kino Classics/Region A
Blu-ray/Region 1 DVD; 71 minutes; 1.33:1; Features: audio
commentary by historian Richard Harland Smith
Reviewed by Michael Atkinson
A surprising and forgotten fossil from
Hollywood’s Poverty Row in the early talkie
age, this ambitious little murder mystery is set
entirely on the lot of Tiffany Pictures (renamed,
with possible satiric intent, Tonart), a tiny
B-picture factory that closed in the same year.
You didn’t see this kind of opening in 1932
outside of Mamoulian and Ulmer: a nearly two-
minute tracking shot from a car interior to a
nightclub exterior, featuring multiple dialogue
exchanges and culminating in a drive-by
murder on the steps, and a pan over to the film
crew, with testy director Tom Avery (Edward
Van Sloan) shooting the titular thriller.
It’s only a movie, except life imitates art and
the star is really dead - leaving nosy young staff
screenwriter Franklyn Drew (David Manners) to
get one up on the stodgy police and investigate.
The hall of mirrors is pretty deep: everyone
(including a very suspicious studio exec played
by Bela Fugosi, who is uncomfortable amid the
snappy ^ost-Front Pagehmltr) eventually gets
around to examining the footage of the killing
for clues - decades before Blow-Up and Blow Out
Meanwhile, the film delivers a stunningly rich
portrait of daily life on a small Hollywood lot: the
story takes us through real departments (lighting,
props etc) populated by real crew workers,
while the head office is home to stereotypically
Hats off: Fedora
splenetic Eastem-Euro Jewish owners (“Oy!”
Alexander Carr’s stereotype trumpets at the
news of the murder, “That’s going to cost me a
fortune!”), flunkies, egomaniac artistes, casting-
couch-vet actresses andbackstabbing middlemen.
There are sneaky splats of golden hand-
tinting by master tinter Gustav Brock, including
projector beams, gunfire, sconce lights and
even the pivotally non-accidental burning of
the important footage in the gate, long before
Two-Lane Blacktop. Of course, the mystery itself,
and Manners’s rather silly interlocutor, are
roughly sketched in (the script was co-written
by HUAC blacklistee-to-be Gordon Kahn), and
of the three stars inherited from the previous
year’s hit Dracula, only Van Sloan impresses
with his sawiness. But it remains a pre-Code
standout, and a bewitching hunk of history.
Disc: Fovely HD mastering of Fibrary of
Congress-preserved elements, but with erratic
image and sound quality, depending on the
reel. Richard Harland Smith’s commentary
doesn’t miss a Hollywood-history detail.
FEDORA
Billy Wilder; West Germany/France 1978; Olive
Films/Region A/1 Blu-ray/DVD; 114 minutes
Reviewed by Nick Pinkerton
Fedora begins with a suicide and ends with
a funeral - and, in between, our narrator
steps back to tell us how we got there.
One day, Barry Detweiler, an American
independent producer, shows up on the island of
Corfu with a script and a prayer, hoping to coax
Golden Age actress Fedora out of retirement to
play Anna Karenina. (Marthe Keller performs
Fedora as a stopover somewhere along the
Garbo-Dietrich-Bergman continuum.) Detweiler
is hoping to revive his career, but it seems
doubtful that Fedora’s director Billy Wilder
harboured any such delusions about what this
film would do for him, even though he used
both the flashback structure and one of the stars
(William Holden as Detweiler) of one of his
greatest critical successes, 1950’s Sunset Blvd
The premise seems so custom-tailored to
Wilder that one might assume it is an original.
but in fact he and longtime collaborator
I.A.L Diamond were adapting from a story
in Crowned Heads, the 1976 collection of
Hollywood yarns for which actor-turned-
writer Tom Tryon (star of The Cardinal) drew
from his own experience in the industry.
Tryon’s The OtherwdiS made into a marvellously
atmospheric 1972 thriller by Robert Mulligan,
and Fedora, like that film, relies on a personality-
switch twist. I won’t reveal further detail of what
this is, other than to say that it burrows into the
psychoses of showbusiness quite pitilessly, and
that this is an aggrieved, desolate film. There are
bits of business here, such as Detweiler’s badinage
with a Greek hotel manager played by Mario
Adorf, which suggest that Wilder remembered
that his metier was allegedly sparkling comedy,
but for the most part Fedora adopts the rueful
and raw tone of Holden’s performance. (With
this. Sunset and his final role in Blake Edwards’s
1981 masterpiece S.O.B., Holden might’ve
been the official guilty soul of Tinseltown.)
In some ways, Fedora - described on release
by Dave Kehr as “Sunset Blvd. told from Norma’s
point of view” - is less near in spirit to Wilder’s
1950 film than to Fassbinder’s remake a few years
later, 1982’s Veronika Voss. It’s Wilder’s greatest late
film, his The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and
its coda might appropriately go: “In Hollywood,
when the legend becomes fact, bury the legend.”
Disc: An exceptional presentation,
with lossless audio doing full justice
to a great Miklos Rdzsa score.
IGUANA
Monte Heilman; Spain/USA 1988; RaroVideo;
100 minutes; all-region Blu-ray; 16:9; Features:
interview with Monte Heilman, booklet, trailer
Reviewed by Michael Atkinson
Possessing one of the most notoriously, and
maddeningly, erratic career arcs in the history of
post-war film, Monte Heilman may not be exactly
the filmmaker we’d like him to be. His output has
been too scant, and too opportunistic; while the
Beckettian achievements of The Shooting iig 66 ).
Ride the Whirlwind(ig 66 ), Two-Lane Blacktop
(1971) and Cockfighter(ig-/4) are redoubtable,
thereafter his legacy quickly peters out into
unfulfilled projects, uncredited day work and
hack jobs. The appearance of Iguana, ten years
after his last, ill-distributed movie, hardly caused
a commotion - it went barely noticed and barely
released, and thereafter vanished into the fog
of cult auteurist rumour. (Even the eventual
DVD debut, in 2001 from Anchor Bay, was both
accidentally truncated and underpublicised.)
Derived from a book by prolific post-colonial
novelist Alberto Vazquez-Figueroa, itself loosely
based on the case of nutty Galapagos coloniser
Patrick Watkins, it’s a fiercely odd movie,
with vestigial traces of the old existentialist
vibe. It’s the 1800s, and Everett McGill’s sailor-
harpoonist is cursed with unexplained lizard-skin
deformation; constantly persecuted and tortured
by his shipmates, he eventually jumps ship and
lands on a desert island, which he immediately
claims as his own, as a bulwark against the rest
of mankind and against God. When stragglers
and holidaymakers wash up (including sailor
Michael Madsen and sultry rogue baroness Maru
98 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
Valdivielso), they are either butchered or enslaved
by the new monarch, who exacts his revenge on
the world by imitating oppressive colonial power.
Shot largely on the Canary Islands, homeland
of Vazquez-Figueroa, Heilman’s film can be
slow and prosaic, but its essential political
force (complicated, if not contradicted, by the
protagonist raping and impregnating Valdivielso’s
royal tramp) has an elemental quality familiar
from the director’s earlier westerns, and the
methodical spectacle of the oppressed irrationally
acting out the crimes of the oppressor has a
torque that’s as Freudian as it is Marxist.
Iguana was not, it turns out, a film that
Heilman even wanted to make, and he
characterises the production experience as
“terrible”. If the director’s name was unknown,
the movie could seem a freaky art-myth
that might inspire hope for his or her next
opus; from Heilman, it’s a head-scratching
tangent in a beloved but sketchy trajectory.
Disc: The Blu-ray transfer is fine but
Raro Video’s usual blitz of supplements is
lacking. The Heilman interview is trite.
LEJOUR SE LEVE
Marcel Came; France 1939; StudioCanal/Region B
Blu-ray/Region 2 DVD; 91/89 minutes; 1.33:1; Features:
documentary ‘Last Assault of the Popular Front’,
restoration process featurette, censored scenes
Reviewed by Phiiip Kemp
Supreme masterpiece of poetic realism, Marcel
Came and Jacques Prevert’s Le jour se Teve (if ever a
film rated joint director/screenwriter auteurship,
it’s this one) was released in June 1939, less than
three months before the outbreak of World War II.
It’s a film suffused with the Zeitgeist, a bittersweet
fatalism; the main characters, hero and villain
alike, seem to move in a dream, progressing with
Going viral: Shivers
stoic fatalism towards their inescapable destinies.
The parallel with pre-war France, awaiting defeat
with mesmerised passivity, is inescapable, and
indeed the film was later accused of having
contributed to the military debacle of 1940. Came
disdainfully responded that the barometer should
scarcely be blamed for the storm it forecasts.
The structure of the film is classic flashback.
In the opening moments a man is shot, reeling
mortally wounded down some tenement stairs.
The killer barricades himself in his top-floor room
while the police arrive and a crowd gathers below.
Through the long night he recalls the events
that led him to kill, until we return full circle to
the shooting, this time seeing it from inside the
room. As dawn breaks, a final shot is heard. The
first rays of the sun glimmer through a cloud of
tear gas and an alarm clock breaks the silence.
Jean Cabin’s role as the besieged killer
marks the culmination of his pre-war persona
of doomed working-class hero, following on
from Duvivier’s Pepe leMoko, Renoir’s La Bite
humaine and his previous Came/Prevert outing,
Le Quai des brumes. Arletty, felinely world-
weary, and Jacqueline Laurent (Prevert’s lover
at the time), bruised and innocent, embody the
contrasted women in his life. But the film is
almost stolen by Jules Berry at his most suavely
despicable as an exploitative animal trainer. The
scenes between him and Cabin crackle with
tension, each actor raising the other’s game.
Disc: Laboratoires Eclair has done a superb
restoration job on the texture of the film, and
StudioCanal’s release reintegrates two minutes
of film excised by the Afichy authorities: scenes
of /es^zcs behaving with brutal stupidity, and a
full-length nude shot of Arletty in the shower.
DP Curt Courant and designer Alexandre
Trauner (both Jewish) have their credits back.
THE MACKSENNETT
COLLECTION VOLUME 1
Mack Sennett, Syd Chaplin, Del Lord, Edward Cline et
al; USA 1909-33; Flicker Alley/Region 1/A DVD/Blu-ray;
1,005 minutes total; 1.33:1; Features: outtakes, radio
shows, vintage TV programmes, documentary footage,
original trailers, newsreel outtakes, annotated booklet
Reviewed by Michaei Atkinson
Silent comedy has come to be reduced in
the film-culture memory to the star-auteur
filmographies of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd,
Langdon, Chase et al, when in fact the market
then was thick with other figures, styles,
imitators, producer-auteurs and one-offs, and this
voluminous set of Mack Sennett’s productions
throws opens that window with brio.
With 50 films - 48 one- to three-reelers, plus
two features, Down on the Farm (1920) and The
Extra Gzr/(i923) - Sennett emerges as a do-
everything magnate who worked with nearly
every major name associated with the genre,
and in nearly every capacity, from writer (his
second credit, on D.W. Criffith’s The Curtain
Pole, from 1909) to actor, director, producer
and composer. Without the emphasis on the
evolution of a star’s persona, you can see silent
comedy’s many other forms and manifestations,
because Sennett had no one strategy or style,
and would throw anything into the pot, in
case it might be amusing. What you also get a
handle on is the early emphasis, in the teens, on
gag concepts rather than adroit execution - the
idea of a pratfall or visual pun, performed with
clownish vaudeville hyperbole, was sufficient.
Subtlety was a product of evolution, and
Sennett’s films get progressively funnier, even as
they vary wildly due to the personnel involved
and the apparently slapdash manner in which
many were made. It’s a vast potpourri, even if it
represents a fraction of Sennett’s output (more
than 1,000 films), with a predictable profusion
of farm scenarios (the rural audience was still
huge, and loved comedies) and plenty of time
spent with underhallowed comedic pioneers
such as Mabel Normand, Ford Sterling
and Vernon Dent, who all knew how to
Lejourse leveJean Gabin’s role as the besieged
killer Frangois marks the culmination of his
pre-war persona of doomed working-class hero
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 99
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Fargo It winds up the tension in painful ways
- not just who’s going to get killed, but how
far will the increasingly immoral Lester go
FARGO
USA 2014; 20th Century Fox/Region B Blu-ray/Region
2 DVD; Certificate 15; 540 minutes; 16:9; Features: audio
commentaries on some episodes by Noah Flawley, Billy Bob
Thornton, Allison Tolman, deleted scenes, featurettes (This
Is a True Story’, ‘Welcome to Bemidji’, ‘Shades of Green’)
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
Every truly original work of art is also a piece
of criticism - Ruskin wrote that. Alternatively,
I just made it up. Truth is a fluid concept in the
context of Fargo, both the EX TV series and the
1996 Coen brothers film, kicking off as they do
with the unsustainable claim that “This is a true
story” (“At the request of the survivors, the names
have been changed. Out of respect for the dead,
the rest has been told exactly as it occurred”).
News of a planned television series was
greeted with scepticism - the sceptics including
many of the people involved in making it, as
they testify in the featurettes accompanying
this release. The film’s appeal rested on some
superb acting and on its absolute freshness of
setting and tone: an expletive-ridden noir
narrative of spiralling violence pitched against
a background of anachronistic decency, spoken
in the charmingly odd Minnesota dialect, a
quasi-Scandinavian lilt punctuated with
gollys and you-betchas, and set in a blank,
icebound landscape. How would a spin-off
recapture that? And what would it be? Sequel?
Reboot? Expanded retelling?
Arguably, it’s all three. The central plot is
kinda the same: nebbish gets in over his head
with criminals; moral police-lady doggedly
solves crime. The protagonists are versions of the
film’s - Martin Ereeman’s Lester Nygaard takes
off from William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard,
Allison Tolman’s police officer Molly Solverson
from Erances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson
- and one of the subplots turns out to be sparked
by events in the film. Noah Hawley’s script lets
slip a sly glee in borrowing from the film, and
from pretty much every other Coen brothers
picture - orthodox Jews straight out of A Serious
Man (2009), a boneheaded personal trainer out of
Bum After Reading (2008), and so on. But with nine
hours of screen time to play with, he also manages
to deepen and criticise what he’s taken. He makes
you aware that Jerry and Marge were not actual
characters so much as well-acted realisations
of ideas - Jerry was the idea of desperation.
Marge the idea of dedication to the job.
Hawley and his actors give context and depth
to Lester’s desperation - nagging wife, smug
brother and the constant monstrous efforts of
repression which make possible that Minnesota
cheerfulness: when he beats his wife to death
with a hammer, he utters little moans that
combine ecstasy with apology: “Aw jeez... I’m
sorry. I’m sorry.” Molly’s dedication springs
from family tradition but also from a genuine
warmth in her relationships with colleagues,
even her inept chief Bill (Bob Odenkirk), with
his inability to grasp the notion of real evil.
Cinema audiences are shut in a darkened
room, time and cash invested; you can put them
through the mangle. Television audiences, on
the other hand, have to be wooed back. Fargo
the series has episodes of extreme violence - at
times I realised that the pleasure I was feeling
was mostly relief when threatened violence was
averted, or at any rate not shown. It winds up the
tension in painful ways - not just who’s going to
get killed but how far will the increasingly amoral
Lester go. But it also has bags of charm: Molly’s
tentative romance with Colin Hanks’s inept
Duluth policeman Gus Grimly; Keith Carradine’s
gentle, dignified performance as her cop-tumed-
diner-owner dad (set it alongside his Wild Bill
Hickok in Deadwood); most of all, it has Billy Bob
Thornton’s demonic hitman, Lome Malvo.
Lome, in his invulnerability and mock Cormac
McCarthy nihilism (“It’s a red tide, Lester, this life
of ours. The shit they make us eat”) resembles
Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men But
Anton was all fate and relentlessness; Lome,
with his flashes of academic curiosity (“I’m a
student of institutions”), his delight in making
people squirm, his grin, is exciting and fun. Some
of that excitement dissipates at the end, when
the rush to wrap things up leads to a flattening
of the characters. All in all, though, some of the
best fun I’ve had in front of a TV in a long time.
Disc: Excellent picture and sound. The ‘making
of’ featurettes are quite enjoyable, though
the deleted scenes add little. In the episode
commentaries, Thornton claims that he was
misled into thinking he’d be acting with
Morgan Lreeman; I want that to be true.
THE HISTORY MAN
BBC; UK 1981; Simply Media/Region 2 DVD;
Certificate 15; 209 minutes; 4:3
Reviewed by Robert Hanks
This adaptation of Malcolm Bradbury’s 1975
campus novel was a sensation in 1981, partly
because of a then unusual degree of nudity
but mostly because of Antony Sher’s dynamic
performance as the Machiavellian, radically chic
sociology professor Howard Kirk, bedding every
available woman and cunningly stirring up a
political controversy to raise his profile. Thanks
to spot-on casting (Michael Hordern, Paul Brooke,
Isla Blair) and production design - interesting to
realise that even in 1981 the tank-tops and Afghan
coats of 1972 looked like period dress - it has
worn well; and it is rigorously depressing in its
picture of the cormptibility of the human spirit.
Bradbury’s novel was explicitly concerned
with the surface of things - no points of view,
no inner psychology - which you might think
made it ideal fodder for TV; but the novel
enriched the experience through description and
argument, and the television version doesn’t have
anything to put in its place. The camerawork
reveals the influence of Tinker, Tailor di couple of
years earlier, and Christopher Hampton’s smart
dialogue now sounds unnecessarily wordy.
Disc: Perfectly OK transfer; no extras. ©
100 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
New releases
© underplay (Mack Swain, Chester Conklin,
James Finlayson etc, not so much). Sennett
did not aim high: the use of the rather pitiful Ben
Turpin looks today to be almost exploitative,
and just as Bangville Police (1913) was a parody of
The Lonedale Operator (igii), the Turpin vehicle
The Dare-Devil (1923) ripped off Chaplin’ s Behind
the Screen (1916) but with much wilder stunts.
Mabel and Fatty Adrift (igi 6 ) remains deft, and
climaxes with a flurry of chase chaos (Sennett’s
films are always funniest when things move
very quickly), while the Eddie Cline-directed
Hearts and Flowers (ig 1 9) may be the loopiest and
most unpredictable film in the set, a romantic
crisscross with a language and cockeyed
personality all its own. The set finishes up in the
sound era, with W.C. Fields’s The Fatal Glass of
Beer (i 93 3), a classic of its own peculiar kind.
Disc: Beautiful digital restorations of
everything, and supplemented to the hilt, with
stray footage, outtakes, alternate scenes and
multimedia ephemera surrounding Sennett
deep into the 60s, even after his death.
SHIVERS
David Cronenberg; Canada 1975; Arrow Films/Region B
Blu-ray and Region 2 DVD Dual Format; Certificate 18;
88 minutes; 1.78:1; Features: booklet with essays and
stills, documentaries, video essay by Caelum Vatnsdal
Reviewed by Chariie Fox
David Cronenberg’s directorial debut is a far
more cerebral and unsettling operation than
any gnarly account of its sexually-transmitted-
plague scenario might promise. All kinds of
anxieties are circulating through this pulp
possession tale, and its grotesque surface masks
its subtextual density and fearful prescience.
In a secluded tower block, a mysterious
Reichian experiment sires some phallic
proto-A/ze?i parasites; infection spreads,
transforming the inhabitants into deviant
ghouls. A lone doctor attempts to escape
into the labyrinth of sterile rooms, while
the narrative degenerates into a sequence of
uncanny convulsions and sculptural tableaux.
On its release, French critics took the film -
originally purveyed in North America under the
schlock title They Came from Within- diS a delirious
howl of anti-bourgeois revulsion, seemingly
intended as a public call to murder and act out
malevolent carnal fantasies. Though everything
is drenched in the ambient gloom of European
chamber drama, Cronenberg’s chill tone and
capacity to make every scene writhe with
unspeakable ambiguities mean that this is only
one of many possible dissections of its contents.
Contrariwise, you can claim that it’s an allegory
about the dangers of sexual decadence in the 70s
which imagines that the bodily fallout will take
the form of a fatal virus and, consequently, see it
as an uncanny forecast of near-future horrors.
Almost immediately you know the disease
will triumph: the film’s real fascination lies in
watching its careful progress. Additional uneasy
thrills come from the doped vacancy of the
anonymous Canadian cast, who behave as if
they’re lost in a promotional film that might at
any moment dissolve into softcore pornography.
Meanwhile Cronenberg finds cavities
inside horror’s routine obsessions - remote
Suzuki method: Youth of the Beast
communities and perverse science - and injects
them with raw menace. This is not just cause for
gore but an expression of how our more obscure
internal certainties -home, desire, consciousness
itself - are at risk of profound disturbances. By
the climax, a slow-motion kiss is as disquieting
as anything you might find in your nightmares.
Disc: Deluxe restoration with a feast of extras.
SOFIA^S LAST AMBULANCE
Ilian Metev; Bulgaria 2012; Second Run/Region
0 DVD; 77 minutes; 1.85:1 anamorphic; Features:
interview, ‘Goleshovo’ short film, Ilian Metev and
sound recordist Tom Kirk in conversation, booklet
Reviewed by Michaei Brooke
A synopsis of the opening scene of Ilian Metev’s
documentary - an ambulance arrives, a brief
exchange (“What’s happened?” “It doesn’t look
good”) and the subsequent temporary patching-
up and transportation to hospital - would suggest
very familiar territory indeed. But Metev sets out
his conceptual stall from the start: his camera
remains on the paramedics, and there are no shots
of the patient at all. In other words, like Douglas
Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane horn a few
years back, he’s more interested in the bits that
conventional films (fiction and non-fiction alike)
typically cut out in the interests of beefing up the
drama: the conversations between emergency
call-outs, the journeys themselves (especially
a lengthy episode in which the crew get lost
in a remote, poorly lit backwater), and so on.
Not that this isn’t formally gripping in its own
right. There’s no contextual voiceover or onscreen
text, but as we listen to the numerous chats
between the crew (doctor Krassi, nurse Mila and
driver Plamen), it gradually becomes clear that
their ambulance isn’t quite the last one in Sofia,
though these vehicles are distinctly thin on the
ground in a national capital housing 2 million
people. Another line, “I’m the only resuscitator in
all of Sofia,” speaks volumes too, as does Plamen’s
casual aside, heard during a heated encounter
following an accident, that he also drives a taxi .
Comers are cut in front of our eyes, because
the time- and equipment-strapped crew have
no choice - and we feel every minute of a
temporary communication breakdown with
HQ. A breakneck drive across Sofia (“Plamen, did
you sit on the adrenaline?”) would break all sorts
of NHS guidelines (as would the chainsmoking
en route) but here it’s logistically essential. An
encounter with a dmg addict hooked on heavily
adulterated heroin becomes a metaphor for the
crew’s own stmggles with limited resources, as
does a brief stop to scrump some low-hanging
pears. Much of the time the dashboard-mounted
camera scmtinises individual faces at length:
even when the medics fall silent, their palpable
exhaustion could hardly be more eloquent.
Disc: Allowances have to be made for production
conditions but picture and sound are fine.
Extras include a booklet reminiscence by editor
Betina Ip about the challenges of assembling a
coherent film from two years’ worth of material.
YOUTH OF THE BEAST
Suzuki Seijun; Japan 1963; Eureka/Masters of Cinema/
Region B Blu-ray and Region 2 NTSC DVD Dual Format;
Certificate 15; 94 minutes; 2.35:1 (DVD anamorphic);
Features: Tony Rayns appreciation, trailer, booklet
Reviewed by Michaei Brooke
At base, Suzuki Seijun’s baffiingly titled high-
powered gangster thriller is a familiar ‘servant of
two masters’ story that’s seen service from Carlo
Goldoni’s II servitore di due padroni to Richard
Bean’s One Man, Two Gwuziors via Kurosawa
Akira’s Yojimbo and Sergio Leone’s A Fisftul of
Dollars. But it would not, to put it mildly, be
hard to distinguish Suzuki’s work from theirs.
Although this was Suzuki’s 28th feature in a
wildly prolific career that had lasted just seven
years, it was the first of his Nikkatsu-backed
melodramas to feature what became recognised
(albeit far from immediately) as his characteristic
approach. It’s wildly over-composed and colour-
coordinated (even the smoke billowing out of
a wrecked car is a fetching reddish-brown), its
style and substance virtually indivisible and
equally exhilarating. If it’s not quite as out-there
as what came later (1966’s Tokpo Drifter, 1967’s
Branded to Kilt), that’s because Suzuki hadn’t yet
teamed up with like-minded designer Kimura
Takeo, but there’s still more than enough here
to betray a deeply individual eye. In particular,
vivid splashes of red (blood, telephones,
clothing) are rarely accidental, something
foreshadowed by a crimson camellia in an
otherwise black-and-white opening scene.
In terms of content, Suzuki doesn’t so much
undermine conventional gangster-flick cliches
as turn them up to 1 1, creating a powerfully
satiric effect in the process - he even contrives to
have one of the rival gangs hold its meetings in a
cinema, the self-consciously hard-boiled dialogue
playing out against a backdrop of projected
black-and-white thrillers. In this respect, regular
Suzuki male lead Shishido Jo could hardly be
more perfectly cast as the ex-cop turned avenging
antihero; his surgically enhanced cheekbones
add to the pervasive impression of something
slightly off-kilter, a feeling enhanced further
by his improvised methods of interrogation
- for instance, briefly setting fire to a luckless
interviewee’s hair with the aid of an aerosol
spray. The BBFC would undoubtedly have turned
this down in 1963 for the sexualised violence
alone, but today’s 1 5 certificate suggests they’ve
also recognised the film’s essential absurdity. It’s
hard to believe that it’s over half a century old.
Disc: Picture and sound are impeccable. Hefty
appreciations-cum-context-setters appear
on the disc (by S&Ss Tony Rayns) and in the
booklet (Frederick Veith and Phil Kaffen). ©
December 2014 | Sight&Sound 1 101
HOME CINEMA
HOME CINEMA
Lost and found
THE DRIVER’S SEAT (AKA IDENTIKIT)
OVERLOOKED FILMS CURRENTLY UNAVAILABLE ON UK DVD OR BLU-RAY
On the edge: Elizabeth Taylor as Lise in Muriel Spark’s metaphysical shocker The Driver’s Seat
The circus surrounding
Elizabeth Taylor’s private life
overshadowed one of the boldest
performances of her career
Reviewed by Simon McCaiium
“I am desolate,” Elizabeth Taylor confided to
producer Franco Rossellini when she arrived
at Rome’s Fiumicino airport for the first day of
filming on The Driver’s Seatin July 1973. News
of Taylor’s separation from Richard Burton
had broken the previous day, so cast and crew
forgave the 41-year-old star for the five-hour
delay with a standing ovation; but her misery
proved omnipresent, bleeding into the boldest,
strangest yet least seen performance of her career.
Boasting a notable literary pedigree. The
Driver’s Seat was based on Muriel Spark’s 1970
novella, a ‘metaphysical shocker’ since nominated
for the Tost Man Booker Prize. This peculiar tale
is told from the skewed perspective of Fise, a
lonely office worker in an unnamed northern
European city. Fise transforms herself into
a garishly dressed seductress and flies south
on a self-destructive romantic odyssey, her
erratic behaviour reflecting her deteriorating
mental state. It’s death she wants - not sex.
Taylor’s casting was music to Spark’s ears.
“I cannot tell you how pleased and flattered I am,”
Taylor wrote to her. “I shah do my very best to
live up to your faith in my portrayal.” The star’s
first movie with no US backing, filmed in Rome
and Munich, was another step into the unknown
in the wild period when she cast off the shackles
of the studio system with unabashed glee.
Production company Rizzoli Film assembled
a formidable team under director Giuseppe
Patroni Griffi. A Neapolitan of aristocratic
descent, Griffi was unfazed by the Burton-Taylor
circus. He was joined by cinematographer
Vittorio Storaro and art director Mario Ceroli,
who had both worked him before on ’Tis Pity
She’s a Whore (1971). Composer Franco Mannino
contributed a spare, unsettling piano score.
Though the adaptation was co-credited to
Griffi and Raffaele Fa Capria, Taylor announced
to reporters that “we are shooting it differently,
without a proper script”. Critic Donald Spoto
was not the first to draw hasty conclusions, later
writing that the film “makes perfect sense when
seen - just as it was made - as a veiled piece of
autobiography”, and going so far as to suggest that
Taylor was “improvising her way through a kind
of confessional memoir she virtually wrote and
directed”. Taylor’s distress undoubtedly enriched
her disturbing portrayal of Fise, but in crediting
so lazily her real-life psychodrama many critics
missed the point: this was a daring and unusually
faithful adaptation of a challenging literary
source - right down to the hideous wardrobe.
Among many outbursts, Fise flies into a rage
when a sales assistant offers her a stain-resistant
It was a step into the unknown
in the wild period when Taylor
cast off the shackles of the studio
system with unabashed glee
dress for her trip, while a neatly prescient
airport scene anticipates 2 ist-century security
paranoia as she barks at suspicious guards
(“This may look like a purse but actually it’s
a bomb”). Varieti/s bemused reviewer noted
that “it will be her temper tantrums that could
make the film interesting to diehard Taylor
fans”, but these high-camp histrionics are true
to Spark’s study of a psyche in meltdown.
Unfolding partly in flashback as police
investigate Rise’s fate, her Roman holiday is
peppered with odd encounters. Ian Bannen is
WHAT THE PAPERS SAID
‘Quite possibly one of the
— best films Elizabeth Taylor
has ever appeared in... Taylor,
under Griffi’s firm direction,
gives a beautifully controlled
and hypnotic performance.’
. ‘Hollywood Reporter’ Dec 1975
‘The Driver’s Seat is a strange, morbid
but intensely fascinating psychological
study of a woman going mad that provides
Elizabeth Taylor with her most colourful
and demanding role in years. She meets
the challenge with imperial efficiency.’
‘Daily News’, Oct 1975
a macrobiotic health nut insistent on his daily
orgasm. “When I diet, I diet. And when I orgasm, I
orgasm,” snaps Fise, rejecting his advances; “I don’t
believe in mixing the two cultures.” She fends
off a lascivious mechanic (Guido Mannari), and
befriends kindly Mrs Fiedke (Mona Washbourne),
whose disturbed nephew (Maxence Mailfort)
could be the ideal ‘boyfriend’ for Fise.
Andy Warhol appears in two (dubbed) scenes
as an English lord, in Rome to meet a Middle
Eastern king fleeing civil war. With Burton
still in Rome filming The Voyage with Sophia
Foren, an anguished Taylor confided in Warhol;
their friendship was tested, however, when
she caught him taping the conversation.
The gala world premiere of The Driver’s Seat
took place in Monte Carlo on 20 May 1974, in
aid of the Monaco Red Cross. The $ 500-a-head
event, hosted by Princess Grace and Prince
Rainier and attended by Taylor, Warhol and
Salvador Dali, stole the limelight from the
Cannes Film Festival, which had snubbed the
picture. The audience was reportedly stunned.
Avco Embassy picked up the US rights in early
1975 but The Driver’s Seafbarely saw the light
of day, failing entirely to secure a UK release. In
Italy it reverted to its original title Identikit and
elsewhere resurfaced as Blood Games or Psychotic.
Fegend has it that Taylor tried to buy up all prints.
Aside from a rare screening at the National Film
Theatre in 1990, the curious have had to make
do with a bootleg Region i DVD, its washed-out
transfer an affront to Storaro’s haunting imagery.
We should not forget that some critics were
mesmerised by the film, while acknowledging
that it was a hard sell even for Taylor, after
a string of out-there roles from Boom! (ig 6 S)
to Zee and Ca (1972). The Driver’s Seatis a
more nuanced, fully realised work - no mere
footnote in an extraordinary life and career. ©
102 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
ADVERTISING FEATURE
CINEMATOGRAPHY
Behind the Silver Screen: A
Modern History of Filmmaking
Edited by Patrick Keating; I.B. Tauris; 224 pp;
hardback, £56.00, ISBN 9781784530181;
paperback, £14.99, ISBN 9781784530198
How does a film come to look the
way it does? What influence does a
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Cinematography’s role as
a science and an art is often
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It shows how it has been influenced
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STUDYING THE
BRITISH CRIME FILM
By Paul Elliott, Auteur Publishing,
176pp, paperback, illustrated,
£18.99, ISBN 9781906733742
British cinema has long been obsessed
with crime and the criminal, starting
with 1905’s Rescued by Rover, a fast-
paced tale of kidnap, and the first
British sound film. Blackmail (igig).
Studying the British Crime Filmlooks
closely at a variety of films relating
to different aspects of criminality,
including gangland culture from
Brighton Rock{ig47) to Essex Boys
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the post-war serial killer of 10 Rillington
Place (igji) and the underworld of
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SCI-FI: DAYS OF
FEAR AND WONDER
Edited by James Bell, BEI, 160pp, paperback.
Illustrated, £16.99, ISBN 9781844578610
Sci-Fi Days of Fear and Wonder charts
a course through the other worlds,
future visions and altered states
of sci-fi film and television, taking
us from the magical invention of
early cinema and onwards past the
flying saucers, forbidden planets
and Martian invaders of 1950s
Cold War sci-fi and the adventures
in space and time of Doctor Who.
We journey deep into the virtual
realities of cyberspace and through
the nightmarish visions of future
dystopias, meeting advanced artificial
intelligences, biological mutations
and alien lifeforms, and on to the
special-effects-laden, galaxy-spanning
entertainments of today. Through a
range of lavishly illustrated new essays
Sci-Fi Days of Fear and Wonder
shows that sci-fi is as much about
ideas as spectacle, and how it
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wonder like no other genre.
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MARNIE
By Murray Pomerance, BEI Ellm
Classics Series, BEI Publlshlng/Palgrave
Macmillan, 96pp, paperback. Illustrated,
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A thrilling tale of anxiety and moral
extremity, Mamie (igGf) cemented
Alfred Hitchcock’s reputation as a
master of suspense and the visual
form. Murray Pomerance weaves
critical discussion together with
production history to reveal Mamie
as a woman in flight from her self, her
past, her love and the watching eyes
of others. Challenging many received
opinions - including claims of
technical sloppiness and the proposal
that Mamie’s wedding night is a ‘rape
scene’ - Pomerance sheds new light
on a film that can often be difficult
to understand and accept on its own
terms. Original and stimulating, this
BFI Film Classic identifies Mamie
as one of Hitchcock’s masterpieces,
highlights the film’s philosophical
and psychological sensitivity, and
reveals its sharp-eyed understanding
of American society and its mores.
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BOOKS
Hard sell: Raymond Durgnat was an advocate for a wide variety of films, including Jay Lewis’s offbeat Brit-pop movie Live Now, Pay Later
ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE
THE ESSENTIAL
RAYMOND DURGNAT
Edited by Henry K. Miller; BFI/Palgrave
Macmillan: 256pp, hardback, £65;
paperback, £25.99; ISBN 9781844574513
Reviewed by Tony Rayns
Cutting to the chase, this is the most welcome
film book of the year - and one of the most
fascinating. It’s doubtful that British readers
have ever thought of any film critic as ‘essential’
- as distinct from fashionable, entertaining or
stupid -but the ultra-prolific Raymond Durgnat
(1932-2002) came closer than anyone else in the
last 50 years to earning the label. And Henry K.
Miller’s cleverly edited selection from Durgnat’s
writings gets as close as any book of 250 pages
could to capturing the ‘essence’ of Durgnat’s
thought and practice. My only quibble is that
the book’s general high-mindedness doesn’t
quite do justice to Durgnat’s championing of
Z movies. The inclusion of, say, his review of
Evils of Chinatown (aka Confessions of an Opium
Eater, directed by Albert Zugsmith) from
Eilms & Eilming would have sorted that out.
Full disclosure: I belong to the generation
which discovered Durgnat in the early 1960s,
soon after he began reviewing films and writing
essays for Eilms & Eilming and just before he began
co-editing Motion and published his Nouvelle Vague
lexicon and the seminal Motion ‘Companion to
Violence and Sadism in the Cinema’. Durgnat
was formative reading for me and no doubt for
other movie brats who encountered him in their
early-to-mid-teens: erudite, allusive, promiscuous
in his enthusiasms, fiercely anti-puritan and
anti-censorship, and very different in tone and
assumptions from the stuff you could read at
the time in Ian Cameron’s magazine Movie md
the BFI magazines Monthly Eilm Bulletin and
Sight & Sound, never mind the UK’s newspapers
and weeklies. It wasn’t just that Durgnat found
interest in such a wide range of films - from
an offbeat Brit-pop movie like Jay Lewis’s Live
Now, Pay Later to a crypto-gay Academy Cinema
release like Giuseppe Patroni Griffi’s II mare, to
name just two forgotten gems - but also that
he managed to discuss them in specifically
filmic/visual terms without forgetting their
place in the larger worlds of social commentary,
politics, philosophy and psycho-sexuality.
Durgnat simply had more ideas to the square
inch of page than other writers on film.
Soon after moving to the US for the first in
a string of university teaching posts, Durgnat
took stock in a pseudonymous review of his own
book Sexual Alienation in the Cinema, published
in Eilm Comment in 1975 and reprinted here. His
self-assessment is quite harsh: “He has always
given the impression of being a loner. He has
never mastered the art of writing as if he’s by
the reader’s side, thinking his thoughts along
with him. He probably doesn’t realize such a
tone is possible [...] Some writers are guides,
others are adversaries. Durgnat belongs to the
latter persuasion.” That was written at a time
when Theory was consolidating its short-lived
hold on film studies courses in America, having
The reel deal: Raymond Durgnat
104 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
already conquered Cahiers du cinema and been
imported into the UK by the BFI’s Education
Department and its house-journal Screen;
Durgnat would have felt increasingly embattled,
although he didn’t publish his generally
devastating critique (also reprinted here) of
the book which kickstarted Theory in the UK,
Peter Wollen’s Signs and Meaning in the Cinema,
until some years later, in Film Reader in 1982.
Never a mere contrarian, Durgnat certainly
was a perennial oppositionist In the late 1950s,
working on a sprawling thesis under Thorold
Dickinson at the Slade (and with a brief, unhappy
stint in the writing pool at Associated British
Pictures under his belt), he stood against the
Griersonian documentary tradition in British
cinema. In the early 1960s, as his published
writing began to claim attention, he stood against
the ‘puritan’ ideology of Sight & Sound (then under
Penelope Houston’s editorship) and its inverted
twin, the reflex auteurism of the Movie critics.
By the late 1960s, having largely abandoned
the reviewing of new releases to concentrate
Durgnat was erudite,
allusive, promiscuous in his
enthusiasms, and fiercely anti-
puritan and anti-censorship
on writing books, he began championing
‘underground’ cinema and became for a time the
chairman of the London Film-makers’ Co-op.
The escape to America followed, along with the
slow-bum resistance to the fashion of thinking
about cinema in terms snatched from structural
linguistics and Metzian semiotics. All of these
oppositions are well represented in Miller’s
anthology, reanimating debates which will
leave younger readers pie-eyed at the discovery
that British film culture has such a history of
snobbery, blindness and intellectual bullying.
I didn’t know until reading this book that
Durgnat spent several years under R.D. Laing’s
analysis at the Tavistock Clinic, and imagine
that the sparkiness and unpredictability of his
critical insights had quite a lot to do with what
Laing called his “wild” state of mind. Charting
Durgnat’s intellectual evolution and wrangling
a vast output into manageable form. Miller
sensibly returns several times to the man’s
recurrent obsessions - Michael Powell, Godard,
Jeff Keen - and in the process anthologises some
of Durgnat’s most memorable lines: “Jeff Keen
makes films on shoestrings and then blows them
up to 8mm” ... “Godard keeps babbling on about
the world being absurd because he can’t keep
an intellectual hard-on long enough to probe
for any responsive warmth” ... “Powell lived in a
class and a country which suspects, undermines,
is embarrassed by, emotion”. But such lines are
ultimately fringe benefits in a book which stakes
out Durgnat’s undisciplined claim to his own
grand theory of the ways we understand and
respond to movies - sometimes at odds with the
filmmakers’ professed intentions. If anything can
bring back long, hard looks at movies, this will. ©
THE GEORGE KUCHAR
READER
I Edited by Andrew Lampert, Primary Information,
I 336pp, $27.50, ISBN 9780985136475
Reviewed Nick Pinkerton
An irreplaceable voice was silenced when
George Kuchar died in September 201 1 - a
persistently yammering voice with a soggy
Bronx brogue. The ingenious, perverse
homemade 8mm epics that he made in the
late 1 9 50s with his twin brother Mike - still
alive and working - were silent, but even
the intertitles showed an already inimitable
prose style, all alliteration and adjectives from
B-movie adverts. The brothers’ (way) uptown
art brut wdiS embraced by the downtown
underground/avant-garde set, and in time they
began working separately - George’s signature
film being perhaps his 1966 Hold Me While Fm
Naked An instructor at the San Francisco Art
Institute from 1971, George kept up a steady
flow of work in i6mm and later video. This was
produced both outside and inside the classroom,
in which, to hear him tell it, polymorphous
perversion was practically a requisite.
And tell it he does in The George Kuchar
Reader. For those of us who have dearly
missed hearing regularly from George, what
a treat is the arrival of this beefy tome, which
should optimally be imagined as being read
aloud. Per the introduction by editor Andrew
Lampert, infused with the spirit of Kucharian
hoopla, the Readeris “a crazy quilt attempt
to encapsulate a hyperactive existence of
creative commotion”, and “an acutely self-
aware portrayal created by a person who
recognized that he was a real-life character”.
Put plainly, the Readeris a collection of
ephemera relating to Kuchar’s life and art - nearly
inextricable, as the above statement notes. It is
arranged roughly chronologically, except when
it isn’t. The character who emerges is, like all of
us, rife with contradictions. George, whose early
output was a formative influence on a young
John Waters, is widely regarded as practising an
aesthetic of total, searing artifice - “the romance
of blond wigs and formica kitchen tables,” as a
letter from one admirer puts it. (He is also said
to have influenced Ryan Trecartin, but we won’t
hold that against him.) The Readerreconfirms,
however, the degree to which commiseration
with the natural world was essential to George’s
art - there is, for example, much material relating
to his regular visits to El Reno, Oklahoma, in
order to observe extreme weather patterns, the
source of his lovely Weather Diary videos. (Also
interesting is George’s recounting of a storm
that occurs when screening these films at a
Flaherty Film Seminar, where he is beset by PC
interlopers. A gay man with an almost spiritual
interest in transgressive sexuality, George
self-identified as a political conservative.)
A handful of George’s sketches of landscapes,
leaves and rock formations are also included.
A graduate of New York’s School of Industrial
Art (now the High School of Art and Design)
along with his brother - whose fantastical
homoerotic illustrations beg for a volume of
their own - and their first muse, Donna Kemess,
George was a talented draftsman. Several of his
narrative comics have been compiled in one
place here - 1 am especially fond of his hysterical
mini-biography of fellow vision-beset artist H.P.
Lovecraft, which first appeared in Bill Griffith
and Art Spiegelman’s Arcade anthology in 1 9 7 5 .
Kuchar may be accused of mocking his subject,
but I don’t believe this is so. As is extensively
documented in the Reader, Kuchar was himself
susceptible to otherworldly visitations,
including a rash of UFO sightings surrounding
the illness and decease of his beloved dog
Bocko. (The book’s one full-colour fold-out is
a painting of Bocko with thighs splayed.)
The cover of the Reader, which shows George
next to a man-sized dummy Santa Claus,
reaffirms the popular impression of the author
as an overgrown kid who has somehow cheated
adulthood in order to freely indulge his myriad
obsessions into late middle age - an impression
George, who writes incessantly of bowel
movements, did much to foster. This is the “real-
life character” whom Lampert’s introduction
refers to, but quite another George Kuchar comes
through in the book’s final section, a compilation
of his correspondences with Kerness that begins
with hand-written letters dated i960 and ends
with emails (and one last hand-written letter
from El Reno) sent during the final year of his
life, in which George Kuchar peeps out from
behind his creation ‘George Kuchar’, speaking
plainly and very movingly of sex, love, art and
Sal Mineo, all of which preoccupy him to the
end. “Let’s hope I reach a new understanding by
breaking with so many rules,” he writes of this
sudden candour in the face of mortality - and
this might also be taken for an artistic credo. ©
One view of Kuchar is of an
overgrown kid who has cheated
adulthood in order to indulge his
obsessions into late middle age
Wild child: George Kuchar
December 2014 | Sight&Sound 1 105
BOOKS
BOOKS
LONDON’S HOLLYWOOD
The Gainsborough Studio
in the Silent Years
By Gary Chapman; Edditt Publishing; hardback,
£27, ISBN 9781909230132; paperback, £14.99,
ISBN 9781909230101
Reviewed by Nathalie Morris
A former power station by the Regent’s Canal
in North London was an inauspicious setting
for what would become the most important
British studio of the 1920s. Dubbed “Hollywood
by the canal”, the studio that eventually
became best known as Gainsborough hosted
an impressive array of British and American
Jazz Age talent between its development in
the wake of the Armistice and a devastating
fire that temporarily put it out of commission
just as the talkies were taking hold.
The studio was the product of the post-war
expansion of the American company Famous
Players-Lasky which formed a British arm in
the spring of 1919. FPL acquired the site and set
about creating a modern and well-equipped
studio facility that even had the ability to
dissipate the pervasive London fog that disrupted
film production on a regular basis. Personnel
were brought over from America, with an
energetic production schedule lined up in
1920. Within two years, however, FPL’s British
programme was struggling. The company
began letting out studio space to producers
such as George Pearson, Herbert Wilcox and
Michael Balcon before withdrawing from UK
production entirely, eventually selling up to
Balcon’s Gainsborough Pictures in 1926.
Gary Chapman’s book chronicles, film by
film, both the titles produced at the studio from
1920 onwards and those made by the company
Gainsborough Pictures (which was founded in
1924), even when these were shot elsewhere. This
approach helps build a sense of continuity across
projects and careers, and gives an impression
of the wider production scene in and around
London during the period. Chapman also takes
a brief diversion even further away from the
studio itself to cover the post-Gainsborough
career of the company’s most important early
director - not Hitchcock, who famously started
his career at the studio, but the pudgy prodigy’s
mentor-turned-rival, Graham Cutts. Cutts’s career
has long been due for a major reassessment
and Chapman makes steps towards this with
a passionate defence of the director and his
work, citing films such as Woman to Woman
(1923) and (1925) as evidence of his
genuine skill and innovation as a director.
Another strength of the book is its highlighting
of other personnel and roles, such as costume
designer Marcelle de Saint Martin, who for a
time headed up the costume department at FPL’s
British arm, and continuity supervisor Renie
Marrison, who worked with both Cutts and
Hitchcock. Drawing on interviews and articles
from the trade and fan press of the time. Chapman
provides some fascinating material on these two
branches of film work at this time. He also offers
useful and informative pocket biographies of the
The Rat (1925) shooting at Gainsborough Studio
host of other directors, writers, cameramen and
actors who crossed the studio’s threshold during
the 1 9 20s. Occasionally the book would benefit
from a more objective approach to some of its
source material, more citations (especially when
drawing on memoirs and secondary sources)
and further information on whether or not films
survive, are complete and have been viewed
by the author. But these reservations aside, the
book is a detailed and thorough study of what
Chapman astutely deems “a microcosm of the
evolution of the British film industry during the
silent era”. It provides valuable and enjoyable
studies of a huge range of films while placing
the studio within the context of issues affecting
British filmmaking across this period. As such,
it makes a worthwhile addition to the growing
body of research on British silent cinema. ©
70X70
Unlicensed Preaching:
A Life Unpacked in 70 Films
By lain Sinclair, Volcano Publishing, 166pp,
hardback, £25, ISBN 9780992643454
Reviewed by Sukhdev Sandhu
Blame it in on the quick-step, concussive prose
that led James Wood to call him “a demented
magus of the sentence”, or his background as an
antiquarian bookseller trading in and talking
up literary recessives, to say nothing of his role
at Albion Village Press publishing off-piste
poets - but it’s often forgotten that Iain Sinclair
is a movie man. He was making films back in
the early 1960s, studied at London’s School of
Film Technique (now called the London Film
School), writes in a style that owes as much to
Godard as to the poet Charles Olson, and even
contributed a volume on David Cronenberg’s
Crash (1996) to the BFI Modern Classics series.
“My discovery of London was the business
of making journeys to find cinemas,” he writes
in 70x70. It’s a remarkable book, produced to
mark a remarkable season staged to celebrate
Sinclair’s 70th birthday, in which the writer was
asked to choose 70 films connected to his long
and often centrifugal writing career. Generously
illustrated (often with atmospheric autumnal
imagery) and printed in landscape format (apt
for this poet of topography), the volume brings
together Sinclair’s essays about each film,
edited transcripts of the introductions, on-stage
discussions and Q&As, as well as a passionately
lyrical reflection by curator Gareth Evans about
the relationship between place and cinephilia.
Movie man: lain Sinclair
Sinclair was making films back
in the early 60s and writes in
a style that owes as much to
Godard as to Charles Olson
Indeed place is one of the key motifs
throughout. Many of the film venues were
unusual: Godard’s British Sounds (dkdi See You at
Mao, 1969) at a TV repair shop off Brick Lane;
Jarman’s TheLastofEngland(igSy) at King’s
College Anatomy Lecture Theatre. Others - such
as The Wapping Project, Riverside Studios and The
Horse Hospital - face the threat of, or are victims
of, the capital’s increasingly punitive property
market. The book joins recent works -Tacita
Dean’s FILM, Stephen Barber’s Abandoned Images:
Film and Film’s End- thdit chart the disappearance
of a particular era of filmgoing culture.
There’s at least as much mirth as melancholia
here. The story is told of Waldemar Januszczak,
then commissioning editor at Channel 4,
coming into the editing suite where Chris Petit
was finishing up The Cardinal and the Corpse,
and saying, “I am probably the most intelligent
man in Europe and I can’t understand a word
of this.” At that stage he’d only seen the credits.
Elsewhere, Paul Tickell, whose Vessels of Wrath
was based on Sinclair’s novel Downriver,
recalls it being transmitted live on BBC2’s
The Late Show. “Is this an April Fools’ joke?”
asked the BBC Two controller Alan Yentob.
If it’s a Festschrift, 70x70 is free of
sentimentality andbackslapping. One of the
screenings -In a Lonely Place (1950) at the worker-
unfriendly Curzon Soho - was canned because it
fell during Living Wage Week. Others attracted
barely any audiences. One transcript is only two
paragraphs long because the recording battery ran
out. The likes of Herzog and Fassbinder emerge
as pivotal figures for their success at operating on
the fly and for their ethos of ceaseless production.
Sharp-witted, cussed and writhing with
insights, 70x70 is a tribute that breathes fire. ©
106 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
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READERS’ LETTERS
LETTER OF THE MONTH
THE DISAPPEARING WOMAN
Letters are welcome, and should be
addressed to the Editor at Sight & Sound,
BFI, 2 1 Stephen Street, London wit iln
Fax: 020 7436 2327 Email: S&S@bfi.org.uk
DONTTRUST THOMSON
I don’t believe that after their death we have to
pretend someone was the greatest artist and most
wonderful human being ever. But apart from
sprinkling his assessment of Lauren Bacall’s career
(‘Slim Pickings’, S&S, October) with petty personal
attacks (apparently she was a “social bore”), David
Thomson again reveals his misogynistic bias,
showing little understanding of women’s roles on
and off screen in the middle of the 20th century
Fine, Lauren Bacall was a limited actress (she’d be
the first to say so), but so were plenty of other stars
of the period whose careers thrived because they
were cast in roles that made good use of their star
appeal. Bacall projected sex appeal, smarts, wit
and a confidence beyond her years. She was never
a girl: she emerged as a fully formed woman who
demanded to be taken as an equal. These qualities,
and the fact that the camera adored her, made
her a compelling and unique screen presence.
Thomson does not try to put her career in
historical or sociological context. There is no
mention that Bacall’s career suffered because she
was required to put her marriage and family first,
as were so many women of the time. Bogart let
her work only if it didn’t interfere with his career
and her duties as a wife. This limited the roles she
could take and stunted her career just as it was
about to flourish. By the time she tried to make
a comeback, having lost her husband to cancer,
female ideals had changed. The Hollywood
landscape was now dominated by sexpots
(Monroe), wholesome girls next door (Day) and
pixies (Audrey Hepburn, Leslie Caron), leaving
little room for the wisecracking screwball dames
and femmes fatales of the 40s. Thomson blames
her for being boring in 50s “good girl” roles, rather
than blaming the writers or the studio for not
giving her material which played to her strengths.
Thomson describes Bacall’s combination
of angular beauty and assertive sexuality
as vampiric, casting this quintessentially
Hawksian woman as a predatory ghoul. He
can’t even be bothered to assess her late career
resurgence, when she appeared in the films of
indie mavericks like Altman, Glazer and Von
Trier rather than simply cashing pay-checks
like many of her surviving contemporaries.
He makes it sound as though she was washed
up after her 40s rise to stardom, and that her
late career triumphs are mere footnotes.
Thomson’s nasty take on women has always
rankled with me. In his A Biographical Dictionary
of Film several actresses were chastised for
losing their looks. Do we really need a film
historian to support the view that female
actors have passed their sell-by date once they
mature and have lost their allure for him? I’m
sure Sight & Sound could get someone more
insightful to write about classic Hollywood.
Karina Longworth shows up Thomson as a
dinosaur in her podcast ‘You Must Remember
This’, which deconstructs Hollywood myths
with great insight and without mudslinging.
Boris Kossmehl London
Spoiler alert: this letter reveals a Gone G/r/ twist
I waited until after viewing the film to read Nick
James’s review of Gone Girl (S&S, November),
upon which I was disappointed that the gender
politics that have dominated and divided
reaction to the film so far were not explored.
In the debate over whether it is a misogynist
or a feminist film, I take the former view. Amy
achieves dominance over men by making
false allegations of physical and sexual abuse;
the cornerstone of her plans is actually the
male seed. Her constant assumption of the
stereotypically oppressed female role, even to
deceive, is surely at odds with claims Gillian
Flynn has recently made about feminism.
James did touch on the Hitchcockian
mode of the piece, which interested me: I
found myself while in the cinema comparing
Gone Girl's trio of Nick, Amy and Margo, with
Vertigo's Scottie, Midge and Madeleine/
Judy. Both Nick and Scottie fall in love with
TRAILER TRASHING
Throughout most screenings at this year’s LFF, the
Festival trailer was followed by another for the
BFI’s sci-fi season. No complaints - blockbuster
programmes need to be promoted - but when the
last two shots comprise one of the most famous
cuts (ape tosses bone, spaceship floats around the
Earth) in the history of cinema, and somebody
decides to modify this to a clumsy dissolve,
I think that somebody needs to be told that
maybe Stanley Kubrick deserves more respect.
David Thompson London
POLITICALLY INCORRECT
David Robinson is right to note (Letters, S&S,
October) that Man with a Movie Camera was
produced in Ukraine. But the view he quotes that
it was “totally apolitical” is wrong. The Ukrainian
programme he refers to, at the 2013 Giornate del
Cinema Muto at Pordenone, was impressive and
very political. However, there was a note of petty
bourgeois nationalism in some presentations that
Vertov would have attacked. David would have
done better to quote from Yuri Tsivian’s notes for
quasi-f ictional depictions of real people, and
are subsequently framed for their death.
Both then are haunted by a distorted, ghostly
persona of their respective loves, while seeking
counsel from the asexual (to them at least)
forms of Margo and Midge, the female voices
of reason. Both films stretch believability, but
while Hitchcock retains verisimilitude within
context, Fincher drifts into implausibilily,
leaving gaping plot holes. Whereas Amy sheds
and reconstructs her own personae voluntarily.
Vertigo offers a forced, subjugated female
identity transformation: it’s interesting to
consider what the reaction might be if it was
released today, even though its appreciation
and repute has never been higher.
Also, at the risk of sounding pedantic,
Amy’s disappearance occurs on her and
Nick’s fifth wedding anniversary, not,
as the review stated, his birthday.
Richard Pask Cardiff
Pordenone’s 2004 ‘Factories of Facts’ retrospective,
which record Vertov’s and his comrades’ move
to Ukraine, but recognise their films’ political
substance. For example, the trick shot that makes
the Bolshoi Theatre collapse: Vertov with “Left-
wing writers and filmmakers alike perceived the
Bolshoi [...] as an emblem of dated, portentous, etc.
Art.” It is the politics of Man with a Movie Camera
that makes the film not only great but still relevant.
Keith Withall Leeds
Additions and corrections
November p.72 EffieGmp, Certificate 12A, io8m 28s; p.62 GoneGirl,
Certificate 18, 148m 5 is; p.78 The Judge, USA/Australia 2014 ©Warner
Bros. Entertainment Inc., WV Films IV LLC and Ratpac-Dune
Entertainment LLC (US, Canada, Bahamas & Bermuda) ©Village
Roadshow Films (BVI) Limited, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc. and
Ratpac-Dune Entertainment LLC (all other territories) Warner Bros.
Pictures presents in association with Village Roadshow Pictures, Ratpac-
Dune Entertainment a Big Kid Pictures/Team Downey production.
Colour hy Technicolor; p.82 Maze Runner, The, Certificate 12A, 112m 35s
(after cuts of 43s); p.64 Nightcrawler, Certificate 1 5, 1 1 7m 2 3s; p. 86
Ovemighters, The, Certificate 12A, loim 36s; p. 90 Time Is lUmatic,
Certificate 15, 74m 57s; p.93 The Way He Looks, Certificate 12A, 96m 6s
October p. 64 All Gheerleaders Die, Not submitted for theatrical
classification. Video certificate: 15, Running time: 85m 43s; p. 75 In
Order ofDisappearance, the actor pictured is not Stellan Skarsgard, hut
Peter Andersson; p.9 2 You and the Night, Not submitted for theatrical
classification. Video certificate: 18, Running time: 88m 35s
December 2014 | Sight&Sound | 111
ENDINGS...
PIERROT LE FOU
The explosive finale of
Jean-Luc Godard’s delirious,
discombobulating New Wave
classic is a bewitching enigma
By Charlie Fox
“A voyage to the moon” is how Jean-Luc Godard
described Pierrot lefou to a journalist in a flash of
typically deadpan jest shortly after its premiere
at the Venice Film Festival in August 1965. But
that’s more of a playful clue to the hallucinatory
contents of this adventure than it might sound
at first because, as if in accordance with Godard’s
puckish aphorism that “a film should have a
beginning, middle and end but not necessarily in
that order”, the trip to the moon is contemplated
about halfway through and the film actually
drifts towards its conclusion on the Cote d’Azur
and closes by gazing dreamily at the sun.
Lovers on the run, Anna Karina and Jean-
Paul Belmondo find themselves in a film that
escapes whatever category you might devise for
it: an anarchic expression of the pleasures and
perils of getting lost that is all at once a musical,
an anti-capitalist reverie, a gorgeous essay film
about painting and a romance in Brechtian
camouflage. This kaleidoscopic assemblage
of fragments is so gleefully discombobulating
and formally provocative that it can still set off
a bagful of fireworks in your mind, exploding
all your assumptions about cinema.
Quick as a riddle, the ending is perhaps the most
discreet and quietly baffling part of all, in which
whatever flimsy approximation of reality there
was before is abandoned. The weirdly ominous
parody oifilm noirthdit Belmondo and Karina
have knowingly explored in between their wilder
digressions has unravelled and the romance is
over. Belmondo makes a pop art spectacle out of
his suicide, encircling himself in brightly coloured
dynamite like an anguished daredevil. He thinks
twice, blindly fumbles for the hissing fuse, and
gets obliterated in the blast. Then, all that’s left is
the vaguely feverish marvel of the sky and the sea,
blurring into one another between the faint tails of
a few clouds and a dying flare of evening sunlight.
Karina and Belmondo’s voices return for a little
pillow talk, together reading a verse by Arthur
Rimbaud, the 19th-century poete-maudit The two
of them take the lines in turn, beginning and
ending with Karina’s happy whisper: “It is found
again”/”What?”/“Etemity”/”It’s the sea”/”Gone with
the sun...” Nobody has made much of this gnomic
epilogue, which is much too artful to coalesce
into any sort of straightforward finale. (Rimbaud’s
poetry is a perfect match: transparent, almost
childlike, but endlessly puzzling, the meaning
hidden somewhere down a hall of mirrors.)
The endings of Godard’s early films are
strange, feinting things just as often as they
are tragic or aggressively frosty. Bande d part
(1964) concludes at sea too, with shaky stock-
reel footage promising a sequel (never to
If the ending confirms anything,
it’s the inkling you’ve had all
along that the film is best followed
in the spirit of a crazed daydream
arrive) in which Franz and Odile continue their
adventures in South America and CinemaScope.
Meanwhile, the crescendo of A bout de souffle
(1959) remains faithful to the traditions of the
gangster film - Belmondo, the existentialist
hoodlum, is shot down before Jean Seberg, who
watches him die, looks away, and then turns
and stares straight at you, at once intimate and
distant, a sphinx at the end of her screen test.
Other films that fade out on their own poetic
grace notes, like Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout
(1971) or Eureka (igSf), seem to play for the
same effects, accomplishing a certain woozy
temporal disconnection that transforms what
you’ve seen into something more enigmatic
and fantastical than it had appeared before. If it
confirms anything, it’s the inkling you’ve had all
along that the film is best followed in the spirit
of a crazed daydream, with all the whimsy and
dissolving logic that that entails. Few scenes are
more enchanting or inscrutable than whatever is
suggested here - a dazed homage to the doomed
lovers in the final moments of Duel in the Surd
A manifestation of Godard’s despair about
the collapse of his marriage to Karina and the
haunting thought of an imaginary reconciliation?
Something cryptic about the French New Wave?
This is bewitching proof that endings can operate
by far more volatile rules than you might have
been taught at school, wandering off the map
to perform mysterious subversions, submit
haunting riddles or succumb to moments of
spooky rapture. Or perhaps it’s only meant to
unmoor you from the film as gently as possible,
just like a children’s story in which everyone drifts
off into a peaceful sleep on the very last page. ©
112 I Sight&Sound | December 2014
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B E S T F I L M
WINNER 2014
/winner\
X BEST INTERNATIONAL FILM X
^MUNICH 2014^
★★★★★ “A MASTERPIECE” ★★★★★
★★★★
PETER BRADSHAW, THE GUARDIAN
★★★★★
THE GUARDIAN
★★★★
THE TEEEGRAPH
“HAUNTING, SPRAWLING... "ZVYAGINTSEV IS ONE OF
MAMMOTH AND MUSCULAR” OUR ERA’S TRUE MASTERS”
GUY EODGE, HITEIX
DONAED CLARKE, IRISH TIMES
★★★★ 'A SEARING, POWERFUL
^ ^ RUSSIAN EPIC'"
OLIVER LYTTELTON, THE PLAYLIST
LEVIATHAN
A FILM BY ANDREY ZVYAGINTSEV
IN CINEMAS &ON DEMAND 7 NOVEMBER
BOOK TICKETS AT LEVIATHAN FlLM.CO.UK
An Artificial Eye Release Ei LeviathanFilm #Leviathan
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